


a divine invention

by witchfall



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Tumblr: FFXIVwrite2020, ffxiv write
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-03
Updated: 2020-10-01
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:33:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 22
Words: 22,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26275699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/witchfall/pseuds/witchfall
Summary: "Can you imagine it?" Mihren whispers, horrified."I don't understand." Izzie lays back down to hide from the night air. "Like I didn't exist?"Mihr sniffs, which is answer enough.[FFXIV Write, Day 30: splinter]
Relationships: G'raha Tia | Crystal Exarch/Warrior of Light, Lyna & Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV)
Comments: 97
Kudos: 133
Collections: Emet-Selch's Wholesomely Debauched Bookclub FFXIV-Writes 2020 Collection





	1. muster

**Author's Note:**

> FFXIV writes is upon us -- please mind the warnings at the top of chapters when applicable. My first two prompts can be found on tumblr (witchfall) -- I may eventually transfer them here, but for now I am lazy ha.
> 
> Izzie Nenelori is a seeker miqo'te who was adopted by lalafells.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I think it would be more proper in this case, wouldn't you agree?"
> 
> Izzie's face turns the red of beets, which makes Lyna's earlier panic worth it alone.
> 
> "Indeed," Lyna continues, "it would make you...my grandmother, in a sense, wouldn't it?"

The Crystarium domes keep heat like glass ovens during the new summers, but Lyna never minded. Even heat comes with its own gifts: a thousand refracting rainbows that dance upon the stairs, fruits that taste sweeter, memories that warm one's bones during the biting winters of Lakeland.

So she smoothes the hair at her brow and quells the strange anxiety she feels upon seeing the Warrior of Darkness sweating so much.

Didn't Lady Nenelori grow up in a harsh desert land, like Amh Arang? That's what she had said, once upon a time; that was true in all the stories the Exarch (her grandfather, she corrects softly, her grandfather, the soft one that lives in her memory now) used to tell. Lyna is not wont to take fanciful tales as evidence, but the way he told them -- the love, the reverence, the fastidiousness of the detail -- had been among her first lessons in the nature of truth.

Her guards muster about the Warrior like young kits. _You're back! How are you? How is the Exarch? Are you well?_ Even now, Lyna finds it hard to think of her as Izzie, as the lady has requested time and time again, but here watching, she can see glimpses of that name. The woman -- a few years older now, but with that eternal vibrancy that is perhaps just the gift of the mystel -- grins at them all with the ease of a practiced performer. She glows under such well-meaning attentions, usually, but this too sparks Lyna's worry. The Warrior had always been worse than even the Exarch at hiding her true feelings. The way her smiles falter, how her eyes dart to the floor time and time again -- she's hiding something, and not just whatever she is clutching in the velveteen bag nestled against her chest.

"Warrior," Lyna greets, and instantly her guards scuttle to attention. Izzie's ears flatten for a moment. Lyna's heart flips painfully.

"Hey, Captain." Izzie clears her throat awkwardly. "Um, can we...?" She gestures vaguely to Lyna's offices, and without another word, the viis sweeps an arm, welcoming the Warrior thus, even as her breathing skips.

Did something happen to him? Had tragedy struck, despite everyone's best intentions? The war with some empire or other (she could never keep all the names straight) -- perhaps it had taken a dour turn? Lyna performs the niceties as trained, shuttling Izzie into a seat in the coolest spot of her office, before sitting behind her desk and steeling herself for whatever the Warrior of Darkness was too nervous to speak of in public.

Izzie holds the velveteen bag like a lovey, she realizes suddenly, and it strikes her how young the Warrior still is. Izzie won't look her in the eye. Lyna leans her chin into her palm, propped up on the desk, and waits for Izzie to speak first -- letting her chew through whatever was making the corner of her lips turn downward.

"I'm doing this wrong," Izzie mutters.

Lyna lifts an eyebrow. She feels thrown from an amaro. "I'm sorry?"

One of Izzie's hands shakily moves to the back of her neck. "I should have...planned a picnic or something..."

Lyna's mouth pops open and then shuts immediately. Okay. So not a tale of war, then? Not a tale of death and strife? T'would be a strange conversation to picnic over. "Is...everything alright?"

Izzie sighs. She looks so _forlorn_ , and Lyna nearly pushes the question again, harder, until she can dig to the bottom of whatever this is. Bluntness was a useful tool. But then the mystel pushes the bag toward Lyna across the desk. "This is for you. Please open it now."

Izzie's tone wavers between hesitant and commanding in a way that nearly makes the viis giggle, if only from how light-headed she suddenly feels. But she does as asked, unceremoniously loosening the bag's neck and digging a gloved hand within.

A beautiful square of silk in a blood red with gold detailing; it reminded Lyna of what the Empresses of Nabaath Arang must have worn once. A deep blue, wool scarf. Supple leather gloves, made to her measurements. The softest linen tunic she had ever touched. Lyna stares at the beautiful clothes, shocked speechless. Her mind scrambles for what this must mean.

"My ma made these for you," Izzie says. Her tone is still impossibly uncertain and her face is so flushed she looks ready to faint from fever. The sight prompts Lyna to snap to attention like a rubber band.

"What in all the hells is going on?"

Finally, Izzie meets her gaze. "These are familial courtship gifts."

_What?_

Lyna shuts her mouth. She watches Izzie flounder through her next words and muster the will to finish them.

"Ma says...ah, she said that...this is traditional for...when a woman wishes to tell a man's family that she would like to marry him. Clothes. And food, also, but I didn't want to risk bringing something through the rift, you know, because I've always had weird experiences with that and, uh...Lyna?"

Lyna blinks. Her eyes feel hot. Realization makes her lungs balloon in her chest; surely that's why it is suddenly so hard to breathe. "You..."

"I'm asking you if it's okay. If I can marry Raha."

Words feel like dead fish in her mouth. "You don't..."

"I know I don't have to. But I want to." Izzie's gaze warms, and Lyna understands why her grandfather always spoke of her loveliness as if it was sure as the dawn. "You...you're the closest thing he's got to family in all the worlds, you know."

Lyna leans back in her chair. She looks out the closest window, into the courtyard of the barracks. Her charges laugh around a simple lunch of bread and cheese, wiping their brows from the summer's beating rays. She closes her eyes a moment and smiles to choke off the tears. "It's not like I could stop you, Lady Nenelori, were I to say no."

Lyna's gaze is drawn to Izzie by the way the woman's ears flick upward and her tail swishes the floor. "That's not the point!" Izzie says intently. She sinks in her chair, which relieves Lyna. It is good to see her casualness return, bit by bit. "...are you still going to call me that?"

"I think it would be _more_ proper in this case, wouldn't you agree?"

Izzie's face turns the red of beets, which makes Lyna's earlier panic worth it alone.

"Indeed," Lyna continues, "it would make you...my grandmother, in a sense, wouldn't it?"

Izzie sputters. "N-no!"

"I'll have to ensure the best for the Lady of the Crystarium. Her ladyship and Warrior both..."

"Lyna!"

Lyna laughs. She allows it to herself, and she feels all of her defenses deflate for a long enough moment to say: "He's always loved you, you know. Even as a young girl, I think I knew it. The way he told stories of you..."

"He asks after you every time I return."

Lyna smiles, a true smile, wistful and warm. "Does he know you are soon to ask?"

Izzie laughs, too, and it fills the room with sunshine. "No, but Ma says I better hurry if I want to be the one to ask first." She suddenly curses under her breath. "Oschon's...shite, I bet me coming here tipped him off!"

Lyna won't be able to see it herself, so she imagines his happiness. It's easier than she thinks, because she has seen it in bits and pieces since the day he ran to meet Izzie at the Crystarium gates. The way his strange red eyes glisten when struck with emotion. The sheepishness of his smile even as his face turned a slight pink. The boyishness of him, and how well matched it is for the flummoxed, girlish joy of his Warrior.

And so Lyna will have a story of her own, one day -- that in every story the Exarch had told her of the Warrior of Darkness, that he was also telling her of his truer self: of the man who had loved so wholly that he had saved two worlds entire.


	2. clinch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Is it so bad that I treasure you?” His voice feels like molten metal, heavy and glowing. Yes: he will keep her here until his point is made. “Does it offend you so?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: rough play.   
> g'raha/wol

"Tap out." Izzie’s arm flexes against his neck and G'raha's pulse throbs under the heat of her lithe muscle. 

He swallows thickly to try and speak, hands flying up by instinct to pry himself out of her chokehold, but it's a worthless endeavor. Her legs encircle his waist and tuck him in roughly against the V of her pelvis and length of her torso, one of her heels digging in at the curve of his hip; his waist is propped up by the taut thigh of her other leg. The only part of him still touching the tatami are the tips of his toes and the useless flop of his tail, so thoroughly does she have him clinched.

By the Twelve, he's never been so _furious_.

"Tap _out_ ,” she repeats.

His fingers tighten against the slick of her skin. He does not. This apparently serves as an accidental flash of brilliant stratagem. Her grip loosens, perhaps in concern -- or perhaps feeling she has already won.

“Let it _go_ ,” she says. “Whatever you--”

He will not.

With a surge of unnatural, aetherbound strength, he rolls onto his stomach, the force of his sudden movement strong enough to throw her over him. She rolls onto her back, and while she is quick, she is disoriented. He is driven by an anger that has his breath roiling like flame in his chest. He rolls and straddles her waist, his knees digging into the fiber of the Stone’s tatami through the fabric of his trousers, and he wraps his hands around her throat.

Her eyes widen.

He wants her to feel her life flash before her eyes. To know what it is like to nearly die, every time she throws herself into danger. To…

 _What is he doing?_ His hands slip down her neck and instead pinion her shoulders to the floor. This is not an advantageous stance, he knows, but she lays there vulnerable on the floor and stares up at him, expectant. His legs tighten around her middle and he presses his pelvis in and in and in.

“Oh,” she breathes, “you’re mad.” She has the dangerous habit of laughing uncontrollably in the face of someone else’s fury. Her eyes dance with hysteria. Her hands wrap around his wrists, tantalizingly gentle, but she doesn’t stop him. His blood sings. He leans down toward her face until his hair falls over her cheeks.

“You’re _reckless._ ”

Her eyebrows squint together. He can near see his reflection in the depth of her pupils. “That’s not it.”

He pushes in harder against her shoulders. She winces, and he remembers: she has a deep scar there, right beneath his palm. He recoils, but her hands tighten around his wrists, locking him there, and he feels dangerously, painfully close to the edge of a precipice.

“Is it so bad that I treasure you?” His voice feels like molten metal, heavy and glowing. Yes: he will keep her here until his point is made. “Does it offend you so?”

“I’m not glass,” she says. She sounds as if he’d knocked the air out of her. Her mouth twitches, the hysteria having morphed into something far more fragile. "Why have you been so _mad at me_?"

His fingers flex and touch her flighty collarbones. He hates that he knows how easily he could break them. "Why do you make it feel so damned _wrong_ of me to care about what happens to you?"

"You love my wildness." For the first time in their spar, she sounds unsure, but even this statement holds the lilt of a taunt. "You always have."

"You flirt with death for no reason."

"So, it’s jealousy?"

She's teasing or perhaps testing. He fails, either way. One of his hands snaps to her mouth, as if he can stop her from saying anything else that may egg on this furious beast inside. His other hand flits closer to her neck until his thumb can rest there, where he can see her heart beating.

She could stop him. He's flustered and furious and sloppy. She doesn't.

"I feel insane," he says, "insane and despairing and _wrong_ ...you don't seem to _care_ that death awaits even you. And I can't fathom it."

She takes a breath, as if to speak, but he still doesn't let her, afraid of what will come out. He can see it in her eyes. _You think too much_ , she always says, but Twelve above, what else is he to think about, seeing her silhouette against the darkness of the tides?

She licks his palm, instead.

The sound that falls from his mouth feels monstrous in its unknowability -- something between a moan and a growl and an embarrassed squeak. Her hands slide up his arms, tracing the lines of his tensed muscles, and he knows what she’s doing but he can’t move for the wanting of it. He opens his mouth perhaps to apologize or to lean down and kiss her until something else comes of this mess, but she beats him to the punch. One of her hands seizes his wrist again and she yanks, ruining his balance. 

In a breathless spin, she is atop him. He blinks against the sudden dizziness, though he is both grounded and sent adrift by the way she pins his wrists above his head, the way she presses her body into his, the strange way she stares into him, seeking something.

“It makes you do dumb things,” she whispers. “The way you watch me.”

“Nonsense,” he says, even as he grits his teeth and leans into her warmth. “We stick together, we protect each other--”

She grinds down harder and he gasps. He’s worthless against her fire. “But look,” she says. “I’ve got you. Again.”

“Izzie--” He squints against the heat building in his body. She is a wild, beloved fool but he must make her understand before he loses control. “Do you...do you understand…”

“You can’t do that, okay?” she says, intent, even as one of her hands frees his wrist and begins slinking down his torso. “You just can’t. I’m going to do my job. It’s going to look horrible. If you try to stop me, you do stupid things and put yourself at risk and I can’t survive that. Okay?” She presses her lips into the corner of his mouth. “Okay?” she whispers again.

“Wh-” He takes in a cooling breath through his nose, but that is a mistake; he smells her sweat and the spice of her aether, like cloves and the desert sun. He closes his eyes and gives in to her. “What am I supposed to do?”

“Trust me.”

At the least, he must try.

He takes his newly free hand and slides it just beneath her shirt, at the curve of her lower back. “You can’t mean to do this here.”

She grins against his cheek. “I locked the door.”

“Fiend.”

“You love it.”

He does. He does. He loves all of her and that means accepting even her shadow against death. Accepting that the other side of that coin -- the fear of the separation -- is this: the beauty of her shirt pushed up, her shorts pulled aside, her hair wild like flame against the tatami. The way she wriggles against him. The way she tastes, entire. The way she sighs his true name and the way he goads her to shout until he has an excuse to smother her mouth with his hand again.

He’s crazy. He’s alive.


	3. starlight [free day]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> With a song and bowshot, she brings the darkness back. He had forgotten the sheen of starlight on her skin. He falls to his knees, glad for the excuse to honor her.
> 
> [FFXIV Writes 2020, free day]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw depression (and I do mean that, and also it is sad)  
> Hooded Exarch days.

The Exarch's brain scatters when he sees her. His mantle of a personality stutters as G'raha Tia cries out, longing and despaired. She is stark red and sea green against the wan, light-drenched paleness of Lakeland, angry with him just as she was in their halcyon days. A century has passed. Those memories linger with him like the taste of her aether. 

But this fury is more pointed. More knowable. Years and years and years ago, she held for him the frustrations of a girl who didn't know how to be teased. Now she glares, astute, for he has taken from her every friend and every choice, if only to see her survive.

He calms his beating heart and tells her to meet him somewhere more private and he wonders, for a keen moment, if he could just tell her everything, after all. 

"Let me first thank you for answering my summons."

He can't. He is a stranger. 

"Do you have any idea the trouble you've caused?" she snaps. 

An inkling, he says, an inkling. He begs her forgiveness, but smothers the notion with explanation instead -- the cursed light, scalding the land of meaning. Her eyes widen and she glances backward, toward the road they had just left.

When she turns back, she just nods. She is just as he remembers. But gods, she looks so tired now.

* * *

With a song and bowshot, she brings the darkness back. He had forgotten the sheen of starlight on her skin. He falls to his knees, glad for the excuse to honor her.

He begs her to stay and she closes her eyes, as if in deep pain. _I guess I have no choice but to fight_ , she says, and he thanks her even as it crushes him. She's never had a choice, has she? And he is taking another away, subjecting her to potential torment, if only to preserve her life -- one in which she will be subjected to heroic feats of sacrifice, again and again.

This isn’t the first time he considers the philosophical underpinnings of his actions. But it is the first time that he has done so while looking at her under the night sky in more than 100 years, and for once he balls his fists in acceptance. His heart swells. How has he survived all these years without looking at her?

Selfishly, he decides then that what he is doing is right. 

Even so, Alisaie presses him to prove it.

 _There are…things we can ill-afford to lose_ , he says. When he turns and sees Izzie facing the sky, ponderous and distant in a way she never was in his memories, he ignores the part of him that wonders if there are also some things we can never get back.

* * *

Izzie stands in moonlight; it reflects in harsh angles, pooling in deep shadows on her face. The Exarch stands just beyond the doorway’s threshold. She looks at him and frowns just slightly, and the shadows deepen just so. His heart keens.

As ever, he dances only to her tune.

“It’s a lonely job, isn’t it?” Her voice is soft in her room in the Pendants, like it could get lost there. 

He should have left. “It can...lend itself to solitude,” he equivocates. 

“Yeah,” she says, looking away, confirming her own question. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.” She runs a hand through her hair. It’s so long now. He can’t stop marveling at it. “Maybe because you would understand.”

And so he is pinned there, listening. _I’m lonely_ , she says, _but I think you are, too. Have you ever let anyone see you under that hood? Why not? What's the point of saving them if they never get to know you?_

“Do you not wonder the same thing of yourself?” he asks her, before he can stop himself. She recoils as if slapped. He curses himself, over and over, as she turns away and hides her face from him.

“The ones who do die,” she says bluntly. “Your tower being here is proof of that.”

He takes his leave not long after that and silently walks back to the Tower, the long way. But not even the sight of stars can calm him. He reaches the Umbilicus, takes down his hood, and collapses on the floor. He thinks to cry or scream or flail until the dread of 100 years leaves his body, but he lays there, the cool of marble against his cheek, and he falls asleep.

He dreams of her, as always.


	4. nonagenarian

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He hums and pulls her gently toward him until she is leaning over the bubbly water. 
> 
> “I’m not getting in.”
> 
> “Kindly come over here then so I may kiss you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> no warnings apply, except some silliness

Izzie holds a washcloth carefully to the deep gash on his arm. The steam from his bath beads into sweat on her brow, but heat has never bothered her. The sight of that injury, however… 

“You godsdamn...nonagenarian.”

G’raha sputters a laugh, leaning in to her ministrations. “Close.”

“Well what, then?”

His smile is soft and gracious. “Try a bit older. Nonagenarian is in the 90 summers range.”

She props her head on the edge of the tub with her free hand and slides her gaze away. “Whatever. Ancient ass.” Details of his new body aside.

“You’ve been studying?” He’s careful with his tone and phrasing, as to not make her feel made fun of, but she still flicks his chest gently. He grips her wrist, bubbles and washcloth and all, and she bites back a smile despite herself. 

“I’ve...maybe. A little.” She flexes her fingers against him, relishing how they slip against his wet body. She presses the washcloth with her palm and soap wrings out against his muscled chest. 

His thumb rubs her wrist. The trail of water leaves cold spots on her skin. “What, pray tell, brought this on?”

She digs her forehead into her dry palm, still propped up on the tub wall. “I’ve been...thinking...about picking up some healing magic.”

She knows she’s saying this like she can just walk into a library and do that in the course of a few days, but he generously does not comment as much. His reaction isn’t much better, however; his grip tightens on her wrist, the kind of pressure he gives when she’s on the verge of something bad, and he says, “Oh, Izzie…”

“No, I know I’d be bad at it.”

“That’s not it.”

She knows that’s not it. The words feel bitter and alkaline in her mouth and she doesn’t want to say them but now she has to. “I mean, look at your arm.”

He remains silent for her. He leans back against the tub wall and watches her from under his eyelashes, his lids becoming heavy as he allows himself to relax. But still he holds her hand against him, firm and gentle.

“Your arm and...you made yourself so exhausted, I really thought you were going to pass out right into the morbol’s nest.” She laughs but it comes out more like a watery bark. She rubs her eyes, her own kind of tiredness catching up with her -- the kind borne of a mind run amok. 

He hums and pulls her gently toward him until she is leaning over the bubbly water. 

“I’m not getting in.”

“Kindly come over here then so I may kiss you.”

She grumbles dramatically but she scoots along the side of the tub until she can lay her head next to his on the rim, her mouth a breath away from his soapy shoulder. He leans over and kisses her on the cheek, leaving bubbles on her jaw.

“I overdid it today, I’ll admit,” he says softly. His voice is gravelly and deep from overexertion. “It’s...really quite strange, no longer having the tower at my beck and call.”

She ‘hrms’ in response. “You don’t have to heal me every time I take a hit.” She presses a kiss into his shoulder, in part to get the bubbles off her skin. “I’m not a masochist like Thancred or anything, but...you know.”

She feels his mouth curl into a smirk against her cheek. “Ha. But that is yet another thing I must learn, even with my mental decrepitude…” His tone turns serious. “I don’t like seeing it, you getting hurt. I’m afraid it’s...reflex, a little.”

Her fingers curl around the bath’s metal lip. “Yes...well. If I could heal myself, then…”

“Then where would poor Alphinaud be?”

She snorts. “Him?”

“My dearest star, I can be your shield or throw a fireball as well as heal.” He turns to smile into her hair. “You learning a simple cure spell, should you desire it, will hardly prevent me from taking my place at your side.”

She does a poor job of smothering a laugh. “ _Anyway._ ”

“I will endeavor not to worry you,” he says, contrite. “And I will learn to trust your judgment on such matters.”

She lays her forehead on his shoulder.

“Do you see how easy it is, admitting fault? How free I feel...”

She clicks her tongue and lightly whaps him in the back of the head with an open palm. “Watch it, old man,” she says over his impish laughter. “I _will_ dunk you. I don’t think you’ve washed your hair, yet...”

“Oh, you can certainly _try_.”

His body lifts from the bath in a roar of splashing water.

“-- _Raha!!_ No, I’m in dirty clothes--!”

His strong, wet arms seize her before she can lift herself up into any kind of position to fight back, and with his youthful strength, he pulls her into the bath. Water sloshes onto the floor in great, sudsy waves. 

Izzie sputters and flails in shock, but she finds she likes the feel of his arms pinning her to him beneath the warm bubbles. Even if she feels like a mop, the way her clothes stick to her. “You're gonna open your stitches, showing off like that," she murmurs.

He kisses her on the ear. "A taste of your own medicine, then."

She relaxes into him. He sighs. It turns into a groan. "Ah," he says, "I may be feeling that one in the morning."

Wet cat that she is, she grins in satisfaction.


	5. clamor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> His crying reaches a part of her that the screams of war never did. Something is so deeply wrong that it makes her sick to her stomach. It’s her fault her son was born into this pain he’s living in. She can’t fix it. She can’t fix it.
> 
> Then she feels hands on her back.
> 
> [FFXIV Writes 2020, Day 8: Clamor]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: abandonment, parenting fears
> 
> set in a minor, personal and self-indulgent AU with two warriors of light. Mihren is the creation of @masqvia.

Izzie grips the side of the crib. She sucks in a jagged breath to stop heaving sobs from tearing free but something in her chest feels shattered and she is not powerful enough; they start and they do not stop, the dam long broken. She sobs and her newborn son sobs and she wonders, vaguely, if this is what it feels like to drown.

Her son, barely a few weeks old, screams and screams and screams. No amount of bouncing, walking, singing or thrusting her boob into his mouth will calm him down from the dizzying heights of his anguish. Her ma had to return to Ul'dah a few days ago. Raha is out on a necessary provisioning trip, taking a blessed 30 minutes out of their airship. She thought it would be fine. Here she is, absolutely not fine.

They are a cacophony together. She isn’t sure how long they cry, time having lost meaning in the blurry fuzz of sleep deprivation, because it doesn’t seem to matter. The baby’s cries rise to a clamor in her head until it feels like she is hearing voices from a thousand different places, the Echo but twisted. 

_It’s getting dark and no one’s coming and no one’s coming and no one’s coming for me are they?_

His crying reaches a part of her that the screams of war never did. Something is so deeply _wrong_ that it makes her sick to her stomach. It’s her fault her son was born into this pain he’s living in. She can’t fix it. She can’t _fix it._

Then she feels hands on her back.

“Izzie, love.” Raha is back, hushing her, but some part of her recognizes four hands, and last she saw he didn’t have four hands, but honestly, anything could have happened in this hell space she has created.

“Izzie, come on, I made some coffee.” Mihren.

That jolts her out of her deep, dark mire long enough to meet her dearest friend’s seastorm eyes, near black in the darkness of the nursery. 

“I’ve got Yana,” Raha says into her ear. She blinks at him, bleary. He’s exhausted but determined like a scholar in the night. “Go, take a break.”

Mihren has to near yank Izzie’s hands from the crib, but the hyuran woman manages it; she isn’t a Warrior of Light for nothing. She sweeps Izzie downstairs and into the airship’s homey breakfast nook and in minutes has a steaming mug of coffee in Izzie’s hands, extra sweet, just the way they both like it.

Mihren also hands her a handkerchief. “There was something else,” she says, in that way she does. 

The Echo had always spoken to Mihren more than it ever did to Izzie. Aether was her craft, a skein she wove with subtle expertise, and beyond that it gave her whispers of things that had yet to come about. Izzie was always one step behind her -- but only so she could keep her safe from the present.

Izzie could not, sadly, keep herself out of Mihren’s purview, though.

“The exhaustion’s enough.” Izzie wipes snot from the bow of her lip. 

“I know,” Mihren says, but something about her tone makes Izzie’s tail twitch with apprehension. It was a healer’s warning. _Pain is coming. I will lance the infection._ “I’ve never heard you cry like that. Never.”

Izzie is too tired to meet her eyes even if she wanted to. Upstairs she hears Raha singing a lullaby, loud enough that their son’s cries start to weaken -- realizing he has met his match.

It makes her feel better. And worse.

“I had a dream about you,” Mihren says, which explains why she is here. She’s typically meticulous about her plans and outings and this day had not been on any calendar Izzie had been privy to. “It was just the sound of that crying.” She sips her own sweet coffee, both hands on the mug, eyes closed. “I didn’t sleep after that.”

Izzie leans back in her chair, back and back until her body is diagonal to the floor and the bottom of her skull leans upon the backboard. She stares at the ceiling, feeling the sick pressure of spent tears behind her eyes. “Did I ever tell you my earliest memory?”

Mihren sets her cup down.

“I was alone on the side of the road. Dust everywhere. People shouting. Someone tall and broad looking down at me, telling me to wait. And I did. And I waited. And I waited and I waited and it got darker, you know how Thanalan nights are. And they never came back. Or I never found them. I don’t know which.”

She hears Mihren’s small gasp. Their connection had always been like this -- hearing the words before they were spoken.

“Ma would tell me, when I was little, that sometimes it’s like that, that it was the will of the Twelve that I be found by her, and that she was my true Ma all along, and that’s true. She is.” Izzie breathes and it is searing. “But I was left on the side of the road, Mihr. Someone, at some point, couldn’t think to come back for me.”

Her vision refracts and the pressure behind her eyes worsens and a stupid, ugly, keening sound breaks out of her mouth. Mihren is up and out of her chair before the sound completes. Her arms wrap around Izzie’s shoulders. Their heads bump together.

“That is not going to happen to this child, Izzie.”

“But what if I’m _fucked up_ like that!” Izzie can’t keep the shrill fear out of her voice. “Yana cries sometimes and I--”

“You aren’t.”

“What if I can’t stick to it?”

“ _Y_ _ou?_ ”

“Can you outrun stuff like that, Mihr? Shit like that marks you.”

Mihren’s voice turns severe and cold. She moves in front of Izzie and seizes her roughly by the shoulders. “You are _nothing_ like them. You’re not trash left on the side of the road. You’ve fought tooth and nail to be who you are now.”

Izzie sniffs.

“You would never do that to Yana. You would never do that to G’raha, either. You never _did._ ”

Izzie careens. Everything is spilling out now. “Ma’s not here and I don’t know what to do. What am I _supposed to do?_ ”

Mihren pulls her into a tight embrace. No one here has the answers to why babies cry or why some parents leave or why the world is the way it is, but Izzie demands them anyway. “I thought maybe he was proof I’m...I’m not just a soldier killer, you know, I--”

“He is,” Mihren says, fierce. “He is.”

* * *

G’raha peers into the den from the shadow of the hall. Mihren catches his gaze. Izzie, much like her son upstairs, had finally been shuttled into a nap.

Mihren crosses the room to him, arms tight around her middle. 

“I heard,” he confirms before she can ask. “She...she never told me.”

Mihren toes a rivet in the floor. She doesn’t have to say it because they both know because they are among the people who love Izzie most in the world: she never would have told them, if it had been her choice.

“I hate the Echo,” Mihren whispers.

G’raha tilts his head, observing his sleeping wife. Curled in on herself, mouth wide open, arms up over her face -- also bizarrely similar to her son. Affection pierces him in the heart. 

“I hope,” he says quietly, “that if her biological parents still live, that they hear of her story and only feel the clamor of their many regrets.”

“That,” Mihren says, “and that they pray every day that I never find them.”


	6. avail

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "You are not real." 
> 
> It feels more like a prayer, now. He glowers.
> 
> "He is nothing in the tide of what you are."
> 
> [FFXIVWrite 2020, Day 10: Avail]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw Zenos-flavored violence, meaning its also kind of weird and sexy. Sorry Mom, Sorry God.
> 
> G'raha/WoL ... and perhaps one-way Zenos/WoL?

Blood fills her mouth. The tang of iron on her tongue and the cool of wet earth against her face brings strange tears to her eyes, but she pushes her screaming muscles and rises to kneel. It's happening again, she realizes. By gods, why is it happening again?

“It is... _unimaginably_ good to see you again. My dearest friend.”

Her knees dig into the dirt. A leather fist tilts her chin upward and she tastes bile. She’s seen this before. Once, she ended it by slicing her neck on the zing of his armor, but this time he wears a regal parade coat over a thin breastplate. She stands. She’s still so small against the silhouette of him.

“You’re not real,” she says. “I’m going to wake up.”

But when she raises her gaze to meet his, the cold clarity of him shakes her resolve. Nightmares don’t gleam like this. Nightmares don’t watch you with resigned awe or have mouths that twitch into the shape of a smile as they breathe, “I did not think he was telling the truth.”

She raises her lead-heavy arms and shoves her palms against his chest, for this is only a dream and they might as well get on with it. But his hands wrap around her wrists; her head pulses with Echo. She gasps from the pain of it. It is the basest of warnings. Something is very, very incorrect.

Zenos laughs and it feels like a growl under her fingers. She yanks her hands away, but to no avail. “What an interesting power,” he murmurs. “You feel as real as the day I nearly killed you on the field…”

“No.”

His smile turns all teeth because he senses when she stops playing. She wrenches out of his grasp and unsheathes the knives she keeps on her person, always, even nearby when she sleeps, even with G’raha by her now, and she whirls into an exacting slice toward his exposed neck, and he steps away from her, of course, he can’t make it that easy, and he--

“G’raha? Is that the red-haired boy, then.”

She feels peered at. She feels stripped bare to her essentials and--

“Shut the fuck up. Shut _up._ ”

She bolts into an uppercut with her knives. His sword comes free and he parries in a shock of metal that leaves her arms shaking. He grins, feral. "The great Warrior has a weakness, then."

" _You_ are not _real._ " 

It feels more like a prayer, now. He glowers.

"He is nothing in the tide of what you are."

She swings. He is stone against her. She screams the wild screams of a cornered lioness and he laughs, _joyful_ , and they dance like this until she sees only the whites of his teeth and the ice of his eyes. She is nothing without her bow, but she never has that in this dream--

"If that is your desire, you will."

The tone of his voice, almost tender in its sureness, prompts her head to reel back. It is a grave mistake. He whips out a hand and seizes her by the neck.

"This is my invitation to you," he says. His eyes glitter, hopeful, as her vision tunnels. "I will seek your answer soon."

He smiles. His thumb rubs her neck in a slow line. The world goes black.

* * *

She sits up in a start. She blinks into the inky blackness of the room and balls her fists into the blanket, heart pounding in her ears. She has that heavy feeling in her chest like she has been crying, but her face is dry.

"Izzie?"

She releases a breath she didn't know she was holding. G'raha slips a gentle, warm hand over her lower back, watching her from his pillow. Even in the dark, his red eyes glint like coals in a familiar hearth.

 _A weakness_.

She looks away.

"A nightmare?" He rubs a gentle circle in her skin.

"Yeah," she says. "Yeah. It's nothing."

But the Echo writhes. Accusing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> might go more into this in the future ... thinking about a longfic so if you see this again....lol.


	7. ultracrepidarian

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> G'raha sniffs. "Are you really trying?
> 
> "Yes I'm trying, you--" She sees red. She does her best to remember what her Ma has said, about being unable to take back hurtful words, so she flaps her arms at him instead, as if she could throw insulting vibes in his direction. "You want to have a go at it, book boy?" 
> 
> [FFXIV Write 2020, day 11: ultracrepidarian]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ultracrepidarian: expressing opinions on matters outside the scope of one's knowledge or expertise.
> 
> The prompt word itself did not make it into this text but I hope it still feels inspired by it. 
> 
> Crystal Tower Era, G'raha/WoL

"Did you turn the key far enough, perhaps? According to the histories of the first monarchs of the Sophiatic line--"

"Can you be quiet. For like 2 seconds. I'm thinking."

"I'm simply saying--"

Izzie huffs loudly and relishes in his offended stare from being interrupted. "I'm telling you, it won't budge."

G'raha sniffs. "Are you really trying?

"Yes I'm _trying_ , you--" She sees red. She does her best to remember what her Ma has said, about being unable to take back hurtful words, so she flaps her arms at him instead, as if she could throw insulting vibes in his direction. "You want to have a go at it, book boy?" 

She is embarrassed that 'book boy' is so far the best she can come up with. She considered teasing his strength, but the boy is disconcertingly muscular. More to the point, he didn't respond to any of her jibes. He doesn't respond to many things she thinks boys like him should. He keeps surprising her, leaving her speechless, and there is nothing she hates more.

"If the lady allows," he says. 

He fails of course. She guffaws as his legs nearly windmill below him in his effort.

He stands up straight and pulls on his tunic's hem. He pointedly doesn't look at her. "So perhaps this isn't supposed to turn."

"How about that."

"But I do remain convinced it is a key."

"Have you considered," boomed the voice of Rammbroes from a separate corner, "that it is a distraction? Meant to trip up thieves and ne'er do wells?"

"Yes," Izzie and G'raha both say, in tones that indicate neither actually had. They catch each other's eye, glances furtive, and look away quickly. Izzie's heart pounds, strange and frantic.

"Of course." Rammbroes goes back to making notations on a nearby mural. Izzie has a distinct feeling he just wants them to be quiet.

"But in the interest of scholastic continuity," G'raha says, putting his hands behind his back like he is preparing to give a lecture or perhaps go to war, "we should be sure to check all of our options twice if need be. Wouldn't you agree, Warrior of Light?"

He leans in slightly to receive her answer, and her eyes are caught by the starkness of his tattoo against his pale, muscled bicep. Her head feels like a balloon.

"I guess," she mumbles. She looks away. "Let's try looking at this mural again."

They stand together in another corner of the room, gazing upon a painting of a woman in glorious, dripping garments handing down a golden chalice to a man in rags. Her brain is useless. G'raha stands too close. His body heat frazzles her like static electricity.

"Surely there must be more here," he says.

"Allag liked conquering and thought they were good at it." She shrugs. 

"Deep and inspiring analysis, surprisingly similar to your last commentary."

He's just teasing her lightly. She knows this. It doesn't stop her hackles from raising instantly because he plays her like a fiddle. "Whatever," she snaps. "I don't hear you coming up with anything."

He brings a finger to his chin. She is but the tide to a seawall. "I'm...there must be something we missed. There is a dip in the chalice, but it may just be to time."

They stand there for a while in silence. They've been at this all day. Her stomach growls and her nerves are ground to a fine point. The air here feels like bated breath -- like something is waiting to snap and set the whole place ablaze.

And then G'raha says: "Let's try the stone again."

"Or, we could go get dinner."

"I really think I have an idea this time."

Izzie balls her fists. "G'raha."

The use of his name makes him jump. She stares, mystified, and proceeds to poke at the livewire, unable to help herself, especially when he looks at her like that, like she's found him hiding in a secret place. "Why can't you just admit you don't know?" 

"Wouldn't be much of an Allagan scholar in that case, would I?"

She puts her hands on her hips. "You can't know everything. Wouldn't you not have a job, then?"

He looks at her as if struck and her heart sinks, strangely. "I..." He looks away. "I want to be useful. They are expecting you to delve into the Tower once we find the gate to its main hold and I imagine I'll be told to...wait."

His tone dips into something worse than disappointment; it feels more like self-flagellation. She looks at her feet and digs her nails into her palms, as if she could summon something here and now to even out the air.

"That's how I feel, too. Sometimes. With this part." She scratches the back of her neck, face burning. "I never...went to school, like you."

She looks up to see him watching her, mouth down-turned, eyes too large, and her pride careens shamefully.

"I mean Da taught me my letters and everything but...you know."

He crosses his arms and leans in conspiratorially again. Can he not stand up straight? Can he not help himself from getting in her space? She swallows down that thought. "And so it is why NOAH will be successful,” he says softly. “To each their own strengths."

“Ah yes,” she says, stomach twisting, “killing monsters.”

“I was more going to say...keeping me on my toes.”

Their gazes meet. Her heart leaps and her brain goes white; she knows as sure as her soul that she is looking upon something as bright and dear as light in a cave, but she could not put words to the thickness in her mouth even if she had the bravery to do so.

“Oy, you two,” Rammbroes calls. “Let’s pack up and return. It’ll be dark soon. ”

They look away. 

“We’d better hurry,” G’raha says. “Or else Rammbroes will start that damnable stew that I can’t stand.”

He starts to walk away. Izzie bites her cheek to stop a smile from curling across her face as she runs past him, goading him to a race.


	8. tooth and nail [E]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You’re holding back,” he hisses into her breastbone. “ _Take_ what you _want_.”
> 
> “Where did you--aaaah--”
> 
> His tongue trails up her neck. She wriggles in his grasp, but he will not let her free. “I’ve had a long, long time to think about this.” A hand pulls at her waistband. “To think about you, only ever you, and what I would do to you if you set yourself free with me...”
> 
> [FFXIV Write 2020, day 12: tooth and nail]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **EXPLICIT.** Depictions of oral and vaginal sex, marking, heat.
> 
> G'raha Tia/f!WoL. **5.3 spoilers.**
> 
> You can blame the discord I link at the bottom for baby's first attempt at smut. Lmao. Anyway.

She catches him half-dozing in the sunlight. That’s how it started.

Now she is here, pinioned to his lap, staring into his red eyes, bloody and heated, and he has his fingers in her hair and he yanks until his mouth touches her ear, and he whispers, “I’m ever at your command.”

...even as his hands work to peel her from her leggings, to pull her shirt up to her neck, to bruise her hips with the power of his want. His mouth sinks onto her breasts and his hand on her lower back presses her in, closer and closer, and she can’t fucking breathe or see or think except for the heat between her legs, grinding against his lap.

She huffs to try and find some air. It comes out in a low whine as his teeth leave a mark just over her nipple. One of his hands moves to cup her ass.

“You’re holding back,” he hisses into her breastbone. “ _Take_ what you _want._ ”

“Where did you-- _aaaah--_ ”

His tongue trails up her neck. She wriggles in his grasp, but he will not let her free. “I’ve had a long, long time to think about this.” A hand pulls at her waistband. “To think about _you_ , only ever _you_ , and what I would do to you if you set yourself free with me...”

“How you would fuck me?”

He makes a sound like a laugh and moan at once. “Please, gods, Izzie, _please_ ,” he says, mouth pressing heated kisses into her collarbones, “tell me what you want…” 

She digs her fingernails into his shoulders. She’s never felt like this, never felt so aflame, so unable to think, but she’s never felt so safe, either, so certain that she can _take_.

“Take me to bed,” she commands, grinding against the hardness in his lap. All shame, all inhibition leaves her when he moans into her ear. “Take me there and strip me and fuck me.”

He takes a hissing breath. “Say it again.”

She buries her hands in his hair, circling her fingers around his ears. “ _Raha,”_ she says, and she _pulls_ until he gasps _, “_ if you don’t take me to the bedroom _right now_ I will--aah!” 

His hands slip under her thighs and he lifts her as he rises to stand. Her legs wrap around his middle and for a single moment she feels clarity, realizes what she is doing...

And it disappears when she catches his gaze. He would devour her, if she asked. Her blood thrums with heady power. She crashes her mouth onto his, all teeth and tongue, and he carries her through her Ishgard apartment until he near throws her onto the bed with his want. He remains standing even as she sprawls against the sheets. She groans at the separation, her burning skin crawling with need, but then he yanks her hips toward him and looms over her, hair falling low enough to brush her cheekbones.

“I love you more than my own life,” he breathes. “If you need to stop, at any point…”

She nods. She considers his face, how long she’d thought she would never see him again -- and how he’s looking at her now, like she is a goddess come to serve deliverance even as his hands grip her thighs like a conqueror. 

“As long as you do the same,” she says softly. 

He presses a soft kiss upon her forehead, slow and warm and loving, and it makes the beast inside of her roar with possessiveness. Her fingers bunch the sheets in her fists. Her mouth curls into a smirk and--

He pulls her leggings and smalls down and around her hips all the way to her ankles in a swift motion, fast enough that her mind whites out in shock, and--

“You will not be leaving this bed,” he says just above her heat, “until you are thoroughly _finished_ with me.”

And then his _mouth..._ she cries out as it closes around her. They’ve done this before, but never has she felt like this, like her blood is singing for him, like if he stops touching her she’ll turn to stone, like his tongue alone could set her completely ablaze. She digs her fingers into his hair and presses him in, holds him there, and he moans so loudly against her entrance that the heat inside her coils in a white-hot instant.

“Raha--”

He gently tests her with a finger, curling in deeper and deeper, and she’s so overwhelmed that it’s enough. Her hips buck into him and his hands curl around her ass and she cries out his name, long and drawn out, and he holds her to him, filling her with his fingers until her legs shake. Her lungs burn. She can’t breathe, gods, she still feels so hot. She will never have enough of him. She’ll surely burn forever.

He crawls up and pulls her into a heated kiss, and she flushes at the taste of them both on his tongue.

“You aren’t done with me yet, are you?” he breathes. 

Her legs wrap around his middle. She wants to absorb him into her body.

“Show me,” she says, “the ways you’ve dreamed of me.”

“You’ll be here for three days, at that rate...”

He’s teasing her. Her stomach curls anyway. “Raha.” She leans up to whisper in his ear. “Are you going to make me beg?”

His tail thrashes behind him. She draws a fingernail down his spine and his back arches.

“Are you?” she presses. “Will you fuck me until I'm begging?”

He moves quickly. He sits up and pulls her up with him, only to bunch her hair in his fist and force her to look at him. His gaze is ravenous. He presses his nose to her jaw.

"I will make you say my name," he says into her throat, "until every god knows who you belong to."

A pause. His hand hovers over her heart. Her breath brushes his temple. A confirmation.

And he flips her, somehow. In her daze she is unsure how he did it, but her back is flush to his chest and she is balancing on her knees. His hard cock is pressed into her lower back. He tears her tunic over her head, and before her vision has even returned to her, one of his hands slides down to her slick sex, finger circling her pearl, as another hand seizes her breast, rolling a nipple.

One finger enters her. Two.

The coil in her stomach returns so ferociously that her moan feels pulled from her. She thrashes in his grip, but he has her in a vice.

"Raha, please--"

His fingers start moving, in and out, slowly. "The feel of you moving against me... "

She tries to move against his fingers but his other hand moves to hold her hips taut. 

"...I could die like this."

She feels something in her snap, then. 

She fights his grip, pushing against him so she can feel the friction of his fingers within her, fights so hard the breath leaves him a moment, and then--

Her head is pushed into the mattress and her backside is pulled into the air and she groans to be so separated from his warmth.

"Say it." His voice shakes from the effort of resisting his own high. "Say what you need."

She is a fiend. A demoness. She will make him rue resistance. She looks back over her shoulder at him, gazing from under her eyelashes as her hair falls over her face, and says: "Mark me. Take me. Please, Raha, _please,_ I'll do _anything_ …"

A broken sound falls from his throat. A hand clutches the base of her tail, yanking it aside, and she sees stars, even as one of his hands leaves her to line up his cock with her entrance. She feels him there, testing her, and she nearly growls, feral with primordial need.

And then he pushes in.

Her mouth pops open into an O as he fills her to the hilt, his resistance utterly spent. She feels blown open. She half-shrieks from the relief of it, from the way he doubles over and moans her name into her back, from the maddening flame it renews throughout her body. Her body stretches around him. She takes a deep, shuddering breath.

He stills immediately. "Love--"

“Closer to you,” she breathes. “Please…”

He presses his lips between her shoulder blades and pulls her back flush against him again, one arm across her chest, the other hand bracing her hip, still within her. She grits her teeth and lays her head on his shoulder, rolling her hips to seek release, but he holds her tight. Her legs shake with need.

“Good?” he asks, intent.

She seethes, fighting his grip. His concern is oil to fire. “For _gods’ sake, Raha--_ ”

That’s enough. He moves within her, setting a punishing pace; neither of them can hold on for much longer. He sinks his teeth into the skin between her neck and shoulder and her world vibrates, near obliterating itself in her desire, in her realization: no miqo’te man would look at her and not know who she belonged to, who owned this part of her, who she bared herself to entire, and the thought alone makes her moan. She bites her lips hard enough to taste metal.

“Mine,” he says, as if reading her thoughts. “Mine, finally, mine...”

But then there is no more space for words such as this. His pace and breathing become erratic and they both fall again, her front pressed into the mattress, her ass in the air, the obscene sound of their bodies meeting over and over filling her ears. Broken moans escape her mouth with each thrust. Her head spins.

His voice is breathless against her ear. “Do...do you want me to--”

“Yes,” she cries out, “yes, gods, yes.”

Two more thrusts and he near shouts as his pleasure overtakes him, holding her tightly to him, desperate to have no part of them that isn’t touching. She feels his warmth fill her and then she falls from the precipice, her world exploding into color and heat and life as she sobs aloud his name, his true name, for the sky to hear. Her body clenches around him.

“Gods above,” he sighs into her back, “gods, I can’t, you’re so beautiful, I…”

She is blinded by the heat as some of the flame finally leaves her body. They collapse together into a pile of limbs, still together, both of them breathing hard. He wraps both arms around her tightly, his body curled around her, to guide her back down from her high. He brushes her hair out of the way of her neck and presses his mouth there, gentle, as if to heal the mark he had left.

She has tears in her eyes. She struggles to catch her breath. “That…”

“My love. Are you alright? Was that okay?”

She thinks, once upon a time, part of her might have felt shame after that. But he holds her so reverently, his thumb rubbing careful circles into her skin, that she feels nothing but relief and joy, having him at her back.

“I’m sweaty,” is her answer.

He laughs into her hair. “If you will spare me but a moment, I will return with aid,” he says teasingly.

They separate, and she feels hollowed out even as remnants of his warmth spill between her legs. In moments, he returns with a cool cloth. He holds her upright in his arms and wipes her brow, between her breasts, her neck, and she sighs, happy.

“It will likely come again,” he says softly. She’d paced the apartment in a panic before he had come to the realization of what had struck her, for she had never experienced it before, not once. And she didn’t have miqo’te parents to explain it to her. “That is the way of this. But you will never be alone in this, not this time, not the next.”

She can’t help but smile, imp that she is. 

“And you’ll do anything I ask?” 

“Absolutely anything,” he says, voice near a growl.

She laughs and settles in against him. She would ache the next day, she was sure of it, but for now she relished lying in the protection of his arms.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i have been banished to horny jail for my crimes


	9. part

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It takes a revolution for her to settle into her body.
> 
> She comes to like her hair as is, even if all she can do is pull it back with a tie. She comes to like her strong legs, her archer's shoulders, the way aether sinks into her body like summer heat. She likes that she can be a bulwark to the people who matter and that when she sings, people start to listen.
> 
> And then her friends start falling, one by one.
> 
> [FFXIV Write 2020, Day 14: part]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> gonna be honest, don't really know if this thematically flows like I think it does at 12:30 in the morning! here's some angst that ends well!

Every day it is the same.

Ma seats Izzie on the tiny stool in front of the small, tarnished mirror. Izzie squints at it, her old enemy -- a dark and curious thing, hanging from the ancient dresser and smothered in residue from Ma's Ma and Ma's Ma's Ma to the point that it looks more like tin than glass. Dusty dawn light filters in through the small window of the wagon. Ma, with her comb and leather ties and own tiny stool to stand on, says to Izzie, "I hope you're ready, girl." And Izzie tries not to cry as Ma tugs at the nest of tangles in her hair until her scalp feels tender.

"Ma," she grumbles. "You're pulling too hard."

"My love," she says, "this is what happens when you won't brush it yourself."

Ma's fingers, though small, are deft; she is a weaver, and Izzie's hair yet another skein. She braids it up in any way that Izzie asks, but she always asks for it the same way: two braids, with two different colored ribbons that she gets to choose because the choosing is her favorite part. Ma presents a small wooden box with ribbons she has collected during the family's travels. Izzie's favorites have lace on them or pin stripes. Once, Ma found a satiny one with a blue butterfly pin, made for a rich girl's hair-do that the rich girl didn't need anymore. Izzie wore it until the satin frayed at the ribbon ends and the deep blue color faded into something nearer to gray.

(Ma still has the pin.)

But no matter how angry Izzie is or how frustrated her Ma sounds with her tangles, the conversation is always the same.

"I can do it, Ma."

"You could," Ma says, "but then I'd just have to do it again in an hour."

Izzie pouts, every time, but she lets it go.

Eventually, she learns that love looks like this: feeling your Ma's warm fingers on your scalp while she hums, stealing quiet moments in the morning with you before the world is truly awake.

* * *

When Izzie is old enough to leave her parent's wagon and join the adventurer's guild, she gets so frustrated and overwhelmed that, in a fit of pique, she cuts off her hair with a knife. She watches the ruby red pieces float to the ground, stark like maple leaves against the grass, and she feels a deep, dark feeling inside. She tries to catch sight of herself in a nearby river. The image shimmers strangely.

The Twelveswood's breeze brushes the blunt edge of her hair against her nape. She tugs a fistful, gently, and realizes that feeling is ownership.

But when she goes home to visit and show off, Ma gasps as if stuck with a hot fork. "What in Twelve's name did you do to your hair!" she near shouts, loud enough that other members of the merchant caravan turn and stare. Izzie stands still and uncertain.

"I cut it," she says.

The words feel like soggy bread mixed with sand. Ma stares openly, brow furrowing, and she stares long enough that Izzie opens her mouth to say, _why does it even matter to you_ \--

When her Da exits the family wagon.

"My girl! Would ye look at that," he says. He puts his hands on his hips and grins, his dark mustache twitching delightfully. "Felt up to a refreshing change of pace, I see?"

Ma turns away. She goes back into the wagon and slams the door shut behind her, leaving Izzie to stare, eyes hot as her heart pounds hard enough to leave craters.

"Da--"

"Let's go fishing," he says softly.

* * *

Her Da takes his time in all things. Once they set off onto the pond, he arranges both of their lines, like when she was small, and he lights his pipe and watches evening dim into twilight before he addresses the issue.

"Do you like your hair, Izzie-biz?"

She lays her head on her knees, pulled up to her chest. "Yeah."

He puffs a few times. "That's all that matters, you know."

She blows an errant, poorly cut bang. "I _know_..."

"But it isn't about your hair."

She tilts her head to stare at him. He's smiling at her in that knowing way, mouth mischievous and eyes laughing -- the kind of smile that makes her feel like a small, treasured thing.

(The kind of smile that lingers with her, when he's gone.)

"It's because you're _grown_."

* * *

Izzie learns how to braid well enough that even Ma is satisfied. Her hair, still short, is in two braids when she is named the Warrior of Light. She thinks about changing it. She wonders, vaguely, if she looks too childish. Other girls -- other _women_ \-- her age don't wear it like this anymore.

She meets G'raha Tia. He's the worst.

He affectionately pulls on one braid one time and the feeling of it sinks into her mind like honey over comb. And it doesn't leave. It doesn't leave.

It doesn't ever, ever fucking leave.

* * *

Ishgard is cold. She's too busy to think about her hair, anymore. That is her first excuse.

It grows out, thick and wild. For her Ma's sake, she brushes it. She admits she prefers when it isn't so tangled that it hurts, but that's all; the world is both too thickly empty and too fraught for her to have the room to care.

She finds her friends. She ends a war.

She looks at herself in the mirror and tugs on the strands near her face.

It's a challenge, she decides, that's why I've kept it so long.

Her braids get worse the longer her hair gets. One day, in the Forgotten Knight, she examines herself in the mirror, she and her gamy handiwork and a part that is somehow zig-zagging across her head, and she feels such a pang of hurt that she breathes in suddenly through her nose.

She could call her Ma on the linkpearl, but it's not the same.

* * *

It takes a revolution for her to settle into her body.

She comes to like her hair as is, even if all she can do is pull it back with a tie. She comes to like her strong legs, her archer's shoulders, the way aether sinks into her body like summer heat. She likes that she can be a bulwark to the people who matter and that when she sings, people start to listen.

And then her friends start falling, one by one.

The First gnaws at her confidence. It's a topsy-turvy land, a compass spinning. The man in the hood aggravates her in ways that echo painfully through time and she finds herself pulling on her bangs again in ways she hasn't in years. He catches her cutting them blunt when he visits her at the Pendants.

"A change of pace, my friend?"

He doesn't know how his words hurt. He doesn't know her father died or why that's relevant. He doesn't know anything about her, she seethes, but it's all foam over the top of something else, which is that he does and she doesn't know why.

"It's something I can do," she says. The words feel heavier than she expects and they settle on his shoulders, the way he near recoils from her. She looks away, but something dark still scratches at her, and she's already shot one round. He's the one who came here. He never tells her what he really wants. She might as well get something out of it.

"Can you tell me something true?" she asks. She can near hear the tension simmer into the room as he answers her with silence, but she presses on. "Did you find a body? In the tower?"

"A body?"

"Of my friend."

He doesn't answer her.

"It's okay, you can tell me," she says, eyeing her bangs in the mirror. "I've seen enough people die."

"...well, the Tower--"

She slams the scissors down hard on the vanity, then. The headband she found in the market falls off its edge.

"Actually," she says, "nevermind."

* * *

His hood flies off and--

His hair is so faded, it nearly bleeds into the light of her vision, but he's still so painfully the same, still just like she remembers. It never fucking matters.

She uses this fury to kill a god.

And then it does matter. It matters very much, actually. He crossed time and space for her and all she has in return are strange and sticky memories and she feels, intimately, that she must give more back to make it fair. She is alone with him in the Umbilicus for the first time since his hood has come off and she traces the crystal on his cheek just as he brushes her bangs aside and she sighs, eyes hot, because he is the same but so, so tired.

She must look like that, too.

So one morning, she takes him aside. She says to him: "Take a moment with me, will you? Let me help you." And then, that morning and every morning following, she rolls out of their strange bed in the Crystal Tower (or wherever they are, whenever they are, whatever world she can meet him on) and she seats him in a chair in front of some mirror some fancy Allagan lord must have used and she brushes his hair and braids it with her stiff fingers, humming all the while.

She meets his gaze in the mirror and finds his mouth quivering. Her heart freezes and thaws in an instant. "There are things about me even you don't know," she says softly. Like all the ways she learned to promise someone else a future through the banal.

"I...like it," he says, stilted in a way he never is.

She smiles. She lets her fingers linger on the nape of his neck, like water or the wind, and keeps humming.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *gestures vaguely*


	10. ache

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> G'raha smiles sheepishly. Chessamile did technically say 'anything' could happen, considering Izzie's powerful aether and the makeup of the potion, which did something or other to amplify...well, honestly, it wasn't his science to worry about. But in exchange for breaking her worryingly high fever from a common malady for Crystarium children (of which she had, of course, no defense), the medicine has made her -- to be quite frank -- high as a kite.
> 
> [FFXIV Write 2020, Day 15: ache]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just some dumbass fluff ahead!!!! you thought I would go angst on this didn't you!!!

“Hurts," Izzie mutters plaintively.

"I know."

"Raaaarrrhhhgggg," she says.

G’raha thinks. He's pretty sure that wasn't a word.

"Chessamile said it will pass soon."

She makes such a powerful pout that he knows if he drew it for Sheshena Shena, Izzie's mother, that she would have recognized it immediately as Izzie but four years old. It takes everything within him not to laugh. It wouldn't be proper.

"You dunno," she says. "She said anything."

G'raha smiles sheepishly. Chessamile did technically say 'anything' could happen, considering Izzie's powerful aether and the makeup of the potion, which did something or other to amplify...well, honestly, it wasn't his science to worry about. But in exchange for breaking her worryingly high fever from a common malady for Crystarium children (of which she had, of course, no defense), the medicine has made her -- to be quite frank -- high as a kite.

"You're right," he says. "She did say that."

"Hrmph." She settles deeper under her covers and pulls them up to her face until just her ears show. She says something else, but it is completely muffled by her blanket. He sputters back another laugh, and gently reaches forward a hand to peel them back from her face -- in no small part worried that she might accidentally suffocate herself in this state. What a way for Hydaelyn's champion to go.

“What did you say, my love?”

“I said...it’s cold. Do you need a coat?”

His heart aches deliciously, gazing down at her face. It’s like pressing a finger into a sunburn. Unable to help himself, he reaches and brushes her hair out of her eyes before letting his cool, crystalline hand fingers linger on her cheekbones. She looks up at him, eyes glassy, struggling to focus.

“No,” he says. His mouth is wide from smiling. His eyes sting. 

“Hmm…hold my hand.”

He really laughs this time. She sticks out a hand from under the covers, still wary of the chill, and he grasps it with his Spoken one. Her ears flatten in comfort. He is seized by affection so seriously that his lungs squeeze.

“Do you know how much I love you?” he says softly. He feels bold and warm. He can practice the words for later and not feel such a fool before her. All their cards may be on the table -- Gods, he can hardly believe that’s true and that she chooses to love  _ him _ \-- but he still feels like a boy, sometimes, unable to explain the depths of himself. 

“Yes,” she says confidently.

He leans forward. “I really don’t think you do.”

“Yes,” she says again. “Watch.” She pokes her head slightly further outside of the covers and, in a soprano voice that wasn’t at all bad for someone on bedrest, she croons: “I ache for youuuuuu babyyyyyyyy. Ohhhhh-- stop laughing!”

He covers his mouth to stop his laughter from overwhelming the room. She is grinning at him, proud and bleary, and he’s suddenly so deeply sad she likely won’t remember this. But it enables him, too, to speak his mind.

“I love you  _ so  _ much. You’re…” He squeezes her hand. “...the greatest blessing in any world.”

“I’m pretty good,” she agrees. 

She gives him the most crooked grin he’s ever seen in his life. He can’t stop smiling. It feels like medicine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :pensive: them...


	11. lucubration

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Oh, there he is,” she goads. “The great Allagan lord of the tower.”
> 
> “You have every right to be angry--”
> 
> “Shut up!” she shouts. Because he shouldn’t know. She doesn’t get to know him or his secrets and plans. He shouldn’t get to know her true heart. “Just fucking fight me!”
> 
> He gets to see this. The God-Killer.
> 
> [FFXIV Write 2020, Day 16: lucubration]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tbh this was gonna be a fight scene regardless of the word, unless it was like 'cookies' or something, but even then probably! You don't know me!
> 
> CW: blood, violence, depression
> 
> exarch x wol, before the reveal.

Izzie waits for him just beyond the Crystarium walls. For little as she knows him, she knows he will come when called. The knife to his neck had been an unnecessary flash of drama; it got the point across. So she sits, meditating on which ugly thing writhing within her she would like to pick at first.

The secrets of the Light? The unshakeable feeling she may cry at any moment? The increasing difficulty to simply get out of bed? 

It doesn't take long. She hears the Exarch’s footsteps down the rocky path and, before long, he stands before her. 

"Warrior--"

She unsheathes her katana, one Hien had given her. He and Gosetsu had shown her how to fell her enemies with its song. They worried overmuch for what would happen if someone made it past her bowshot.

The only ones who do are usually invited there. 

"Now, Warrior, let me explain--"

"I have a name."

He stops, then. He sets his staff against the ground, imperial, inspecting her. Her skin crawls strangely. He opts for silence.

"Do you want to fight or not?" she snaps.

He ponders it for a long moment. She thinks he may turn and leave. And then he says: “Not the bow?” 

“I don't actually want to kill you.” The words are ice in her throat. She curls her fingers around her blade hilt and tries not to hurt.

“I see,” he says. His voice wavers in that frustrating place. It scalds her and yet roils with jest. “Then I don’t see why I should--”

She charges him.

Her katana clangs against his staff like lightning in a valley and she hears him swallow back a curse. She stares into the eternal shadow of his face. Truth must out. It must. The threat of her blade is the only tool that has ever served her faithfully, even as she despises it, but his mouth pins in a line and he holds steady against her.

“You would attack before I’ve accepted your terms?”

“You’re out here, aren’t you?”

His teeth flash white. “You’re hurting because of the battle, I know--”

She digs her feet into the ground and _twists_. Her heels slide in the dirt and her waist near snaps as her aether follows her sword in a diagonal slash and she sends him flying backward. He knows nothing. He knows shit all about her. He does this stupid masquerade for reasons she can’t fathom. Wouldn’t it be easier for them both if the act fucking ceased?

She charges him again. This time he’s ready for her.

She hears it in the Echo before she feels the density of his magic saturate the air. Her sword meets his golden barrier in a glossy karang. He holds his crystal arm aloft. All she can see is his mouth, still in an enigmatic line, and she shouts, wordless in her fury as her arms ache from the reverb. He is unmoved by her. He will not fight back.

She swings her heel into a roundhouse kick against the barrier, hard enough to see it shatter, but she hears the shriek of the tower as it rushes to his aid. Thin cracks spiderweb across his barrier's surface, but still it holds.

She settles back onto her two feet. "You really just gonna make me pummel a barrier until I hit you?" she seethes.

"You never were good at chess," he says.

_What? How would he-_

A stone comes hurtling from her left side, the warning from the Echo nearly too late thanks to the warping speed of the power of Allag. She rolls out of its way, only to feel the earth begin to crack beneath her. 

Would he let her fall?

She turns back to stare, and his face reveals nothing; she feels only the fizz of power against her skin. But she sees, for a split second, the hesitation in the pouring of his energy between barrier or weapon. She charges again. Her sword connects with the barrier and it scatters like coals in a bonfire. 

He stumbles onto his back foot, but suddenly she tastes levin in her mouth. An unseen force collides with her chest, sending her spinning. Her teeth buzz. She tastes metal. She’s always relished this part, when her thoughts become movement become instinct, and she lands on her feet as light as fallen leaves. She feels the zing of laughter but none of its mirth.

“Oh, there he is,” she goads. “The great Allagan lord of the tower.”

“You have every right to be angry-”

“Shut up!” she shouts. Because he shouldn’t know. She doesn’t get to know him or his secrets and plans. He shouldn’t get to know her true heart. “Just fucking fight me!”

He gets to see this. The God-Killer.

They have it out.

Magic and aether throb. The purple of Lakeland is spun up like dye. The air churns and snaps as he throws spell after spell in her direction, but she is the desert wind come to desiccate him. She dances and spins out of the way and her blade sings back toward him, seeking blood. Every time, she collides with a shield of light. Every time, she hears a thousand voices scream -- ghosts from the tower he wields like a weapon, surely. And that makes her angrier, because she does not hear _his_ voice, the only ghost of that place that matters.

She shatters his shield like porcelain and draws blood. Now she has this: proof of his mortality. It is sand between her fingers.

The Echo pulses.

... _you are our salvation..._

She stumbles backward at the strangeness of it, a vision not quite formed, but just as suddenly it is yanked from her in a wrenching twist, and -

“Enough!” the Exarch shouts.

She can’t recover in time. She suspects, later on, that it wouldn’t have mattered. She can’t stop studying the cut on his arm, like it’ll spill his secrets out in deep crimson. A bone-shattering force slams into her back, crushing her to the splintered ground. Her elbows hit stone. Something cold gashes her cheek.

The will to fight leaves her like water breaking.

It could be his magic; so claims the part of her that scrabbles for survival at every push. It could be the Light, shattering her in pain and absolution that he won’t speak to her about. But she claws against something else. He won’t tell her what she needs to know. She doesn’t know what she needs to know. She’s floundering against the tides for no reason.

She decides not to get up.

“Are you finished, then?” he calls out.

She decides not to answer him, either. His feet move slow and uncertain across the path until she remains still too long for his comfort, and suddenly he is running. He kneels down beside her.

He says her name. She holds her silence

“Izzie,” he says again. His voice cracks.

It’s heartbreaking and she doesn’t know why.

“Good hit,” she mumbles into the ground. “Just leave me here with my dignity.”

“I can’t do that.”

Which, when she thinks about it later, is a strange thing to say. He could have. He should have. But that is the way of it with him. He knows her. She will only ever see sparks.


	12. fade

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mihren hides a cough behind her hand and mutters something irritably before she speaks again, eyeing the cig between her fingers like it is a puzzle she’s figuring out. “There’s a saying about how you can’t go home again.”
> 
> Izzie squints into the twilight. Her heart rolls strangely. “Thinkin’ bout the good ol’ days?”
> 
> [FFXIV Write 2020, day 17: fade]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This takes place in @masqvia and I's 2 WoL AU -- pondering how that changes some things in the ShB story. Mihren is a hyur mage.
> 
> CW: smoking

"Put that thing out or so help me."

Izzie startles, dropping the cig in fear. She watches it fall from the height of the Crystarium walls and then catch on the wind before it flutters uselessly to the ground of Lakeland. "I'm not--"

"Uh-huh." Mihren stands before her, hands on her hips, looking down at her regally. "Where the hells did you even find something like that here, anyway?"

"People smoke everywhere, Mihr."

The hyur regards her. _You know what I meant._ And then she flops down into a sit next to Izzie, knees curled up to her chin. "Maybe you could share."

"Ha."

Izzie kicks her legs, dangling over the edge, and watches Mihren out of the corner of her eye. Mihren taps her foot and her eyes dart across the horizon. She wants to talk, but she’s not ready; Izzie knows the signs by now. 

“It’s a pretty sunset,” Izzie says. 

“One of the first in a hundred years.”

“Mhmm.” Izzie flicks ash from her fingers. “The Exarch said this would be a good place to sightsee.”

“Did he?”

Izzie turns her head in full. “...what?”

“Nothing.”

“Mihr.”

Mihren sighs, morose, and lays her forehead on her knees. Her voice is muffled by her leather longcoat. “There’s just a lot,” she says, monotone in a way she hasn’t been since the Dragonsong War. It makes Izzie’s shoulders feel heavier. “His plan, whatever it is, relies on us doing something _multiple times_ that no one else has done and _survived_ in the history of this star. Except Minfilia. Which--”

“--is another thing, yeah.”

“Yeah.”

Izzie turns her face into the slight breeze -- another blessing returned to this land by the banishment of Light. The rest of that conversation largely goes unspoken. What were they to do? Say no? Deny the promise of sunset to the rest of Norvrandt and, if the Exarch is right, potentially the future of both this world and the Source?

They did it once. They have no way of knowing for certain if it is a fluke.

“I don’t know.” Izzie, even under the watchful eye of Mihren, risks pulling out the box of cigs she bought earlier. They taste different than on the Source. She’s still working it out on her tongue. “He wants us alive. Whatever his ultimate reasons are...he has the love of an _entire city._ He protects those people. He believes in it. If he’s using us for the sake of these people alone then…” She shrugs, offering Mihren a cig as she does so. “Not so different from other shit we’ve done, if you think about it.”

Mihren examines the cig closely but does end up taking it. “That’s...true.” 

Izzie offers her a lighter; the hyur rolls her eyes and lights both of their cigs with a snap. 

“But,” Izzie says, tasting the cigarette, “it’s also not the same.”

Mihren hides a cough behind her hand and mutters something irritably before she speaks again, eyeing the cig between her fingers like it is a puzzle she’s figuring out. “There’s a saying about how you can’t go home again.”

Izzie squints into the twilight. Her heart rolls strangely. “Thinkin’ bout the good ol’ days?”

A shadow enters Mihren’s voice. “Ever since we stumbled upon that merchant.”

And how quickly he died here, in this rotten land. His fat ring, fallen to the ground like bones spat from an owl. He reminded Izzie of someone in her old caravan. Everytime she thinks about it she has to take a deep breath; this time her lungs fill with heady smoke.

“I wonder sometimes,” Mihren says, “if this is it. If this is going to be the one time where we don’t do it right. Where there’s just not...enough. There’s so much strangeness going on this time. With...Ardbert, and--”

“Hi Ardbert,” Izzie says to nobody.

“--ha. And...the Exarch.”

Back to him again. Izzie has a feeling they’re circling around to the point of it, but that thought makes her stare brazenly toward the setting sun. She wants to burn the purples and oranges and pinks into her eyelids, to remember it when they go into the Light-blasted lands. But enough time passes that she realizes Mihren is waiting for her to reach the center of this mire.

“He said G’raha wasn’t there,” Izzie says. She feels, strangely, like she’s entering a tunnel. She just has to get through it. “Which means. He’s...still in there somewhere, sleeping. Or. He died. Maybe he’s dead on the Source. I don’t know.”

She hadn’t thought of that until she spoke it aloud; she feels raw, like when he first closed the doors behind him.

Mihren’s brow furrows. “You believe him?”

Izzie tilts her head toward Mihren. Sunspots blotch out her face. “Why would he lie about that? What would he get out of it?”

Mihren rolls her lips together. Something flashes in her eyes, then -- anger, maybe. It looks a little like how she gets when she senses a great injustice. Izzie looks away, flummoxed. “Anyway,” she says quickly, before Mihren can add anything more, “I thought about asking if I could go look but it would probably be a waste of time. And wouldn’t you be mad? Waking up someplace like this?”

“Hell of a place to be a hero.”

Izzie grins lopsided at that, squishing the cig between her teeth. “Guess that’s why we’re here.”

They sit together until the colors fade to blues and blacks and the cold nips at their skin. Izzie realizes they hadn’t watched a sunset together in what felt like years -- not like this, with little else to gain from it but the passing of an eve. It smothers the dissonance churning in her gut since they faced the Lightwarden. It makes her feel a little more whole. 

It had been so long since they were just two adventurers on the road. They’re still not that, anymore. But some nights it is easier to pretend.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mihren def knows who tf that binch is, bet


	13. where the heart is

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For one hundred years, he had been certain he’d never have this chance. Now that he does, he might drown in his own blood. He can hardly speak.
> 
> So she speaks first.
> 
> “I don’t know which one of us is stupider,” she says. 
> 
> [FFXIV Write 2020, day 19: where the heart is]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two WoL AU.   
> A version.
> 
> g'raha x wol. 5.0 spoilers.

When the Crystarium celebrates the final return of the night, Mihren tells him he’s a coward.

He shouldn’t be surprised by this. He’s seen the needle-like focus of her gaze upon her enemies, searing as a brand; he’s the target of it now for reasons that make his heart soar beyond the horizon, painful and throbbing. 

She views him as a threat to Izzie’s happiness. 

“If you don’t go talk to her, I’ll set you alight, whole city be damned,” she snaps at him. One hand holds a glass of champagne. The other grasps him by the shoulder, her body squared up in front of him like a tiny wall. For a diminutive mage, her grip is vice-like. 

“I am not sure she--”

She shakes him once, hard. “Really, G’raha? Really?” He may be Exarch of this city, but his eyes shift to the ground in shame like he’s being scolded by his mother. “She’s not going to make it easy for you. Obviously. But you have to fix this. Or do you not care for her like you think you do?”

That does it. He’ll take insults to himself but he won’t take accusations regarding his all-consuming love for Izzie Nenelori. Mihren smirks at him and lets him go.

“Good luck,” she says cheerfully, like she hadn’t just threatened his life.

* * *

When G’raha finally finds her, he understands Mihren’s fury instantly.

Be they intimate gatherings or boisterous parties, Izzie thrives at the center of celebration -- a brilliant gem of joy, shimmering under light. Now, she sits in a quiet, shadowy corner of the Stairs, nursing a mug of ale, forehead in her palm like she’s too tired to comprehend the triumph echoing through the city.

“Come dance with me,” Alisaie demands of her, standing over Izzie with her hands on her hips. Somehow, she is both pleading and commanding in the same tone.

Izzie glances up to her, an excuse ready on her lips. “I don’t really--”

And then she spots him approaching.

Alisaie, tracking the shift in her gaze, turns back to regard G’raha with a mix of relief and distrust. Her eyes narrow. “Ah, Exarch. Or...G’raha Tia. As it so turns out.”

“The same.” His mouth quirks upward. He turns his gaze to Izzie and feels, for a moment, like he is looking at the sun. His eyes near hurt at the sight of her. “Izzie...can I have a word?”

“Oh, I see,” Alisaie says. He struggles to read her tone now that he is in Izzie’s aura, like her very presence scatters his thoughts like a prism. “Mihren finally got to you. Good. I’ll leave you to it.”

That comment alone makes Izzie’s ears flatten against her head, but it does serve to keep her in her seat, even as Alisaie departs with a wave of her hand. Quiet descends immediately. His heart pounds so fiercely he can hear little else. He feels like his ancestors have silenced the world around them, an audience taking its seat as the curtain rises.

He takes a chance and sits down on the bench, right next to her. She doesn’t move. His arm nearly touches hers; he’s so close that her warmth curls against his skin and whites out his thoughts. Her long hair falls in front of her face like a curtain as she tilts her face away.

For one hundred years, he had been certain he’d never have this chance. Now that he does, he might drown in his own blood. He can hardly speak.

So she speaks first.

“I don’t know which one of us is stupider,” she says. 

Blunt as a hammer against the glass around his heart. He takes a breath. It is shaky and hot down his throat. “I have much to apologize for--”

“ _ Yeah. _ ” She turns her face round to pin him with her gaze, shining and watery beneath the lamp light. “Yeah, you do. You...you absolute…”

She slams a fist into the table. Her heavy mug jumps in the air. He hovers a hand outward to reach for her by instinct, pulled like a magnet to her pain so he could assuage it, but he is the cause. He’s only ever been the cause.

_ Did you know she cried for months, after you left?  _

She eyes his hand like an insect. He speaks, instead. 

“Izzie.” He invokes her name, a benediction, and perhaps it works; her mouth slackens, though her fist still trembles on the table. “I will never be able to atone for what I put you through. I know that. I know that…” He takes another breath, steels himself. “...that I decided your fate for you and for...for us...so many times, but it was all in the effort to see…”

To see her staring at him like this, sea glass eyes piercing him through, her mouth tilted just so, the moonlight -- gods the moonlight -- somehow casting off her pale skin. To see her freckles swim in the rose of her cheekbones.

His intentions die. He speaks his heart. “I never thought I’d be worthy of you. I thought you would forget.”

Her mouth curls into a snarl. He braces himself.

“I love you,” she says first.

He can’t  _ breathe. _

“You moron. You idiot. I loved you again even when you wore that stupid hood. How in all of the fucking worlds did you think I would forget about you? That I wouldn’t know the sound of your voice, or...the shape of your stupid, asshole mouth, you--” She takes a keening breath and stuffs her hands into her eyes and bares her teeth. “I hate you, you...”

He slides between doors as she tries to shut herself in. He leans forward, arm braced against the table, diving into her warmth until their noses nearly touch. He doesn’t deserve her in any world. He can’t bear to see her like this, now. She startles. She meets his gaze. 

He presses his lips against a fallen tear. The crystal marring his face burns in her presence.

“I will make amends,” he says against her skin. “I will.”

He nearly ascends on the spot when her arm slides around his shoulder. “I should choke you out. You’re the stupidest man alive.”

And then she kisses him.

He hears fireworks, or perhaps his brain’s final synapses. He isn’t sure. But he also feels his heart slide into place. A final brick laid. A ribbon, cut.

He is home in her arms. A truth, promised like the dawn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yeets into the aether
> 
> i'll write five million versions of this scene probably anyway bye


	14. foibles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The poem is inspired by an old Meracydian style. Compliments are woven like insults, meant to trick the gods and steer their eyes away from the beloved -- something he knows would make her laugh.
> 
> [FFXIV Write 2020, day 21: foibles]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sometimes you write something fully formed. sometimes you write nonsense. sometimes you write meta about how you wish you could write something fully formed and instead get out nonsense.
> 
> **5.3 spoilers**

Against the expectations of his youth, dawn has become G'raha's favored time -- a small, captured moment when the world is still and his entire. Perhaps it is his old, heavy soul in this body, he admits, but a larger part of him suspects it is the sounds of his beloved, sleeping next to him, and the way dawn light captures her face in a rare moment of peace.

He lays a leg against her back to feel its slow rise and fall as he writes.

_Like star's wake,_  
_her hair strewn bright across the pillow._  
_She is dawn's dashed flame; an ache_  
_to fie all yon time's heroes._  
_Touch her, not -- even gods abide_  
_the tide of heat her glare implied._

He frowns at the rust of his wordplay.

The poem is inspired by an old Meracydian style. Compliments are woven like insults, meant to trick the gods and steer their eyes away from the beloved -- something he knows would make her laugh. It's the perfect collaboration of their interests: his, academic and historical, and hers, fantastical and curious. He intends to set it to one of the songs she was writing as his gift for her upcoming nameday. He had enlisted the help of Alphinaud in setting it to the composition, but the words, he feels, must be his own.

He squints against the pale light of a new day and hones his focus. But then Izzie stirs.

He leans in lightly toward her. Her back unfurls like a hot-house rose; she sleeps so tightly curled in on herself, as if she must subconsciously protect herself from the ravages of the day. "Ey," she mutters.

Her ear smashes into his shoulder. Her eyes do not fully open and for this he is thankful. He pulls back his parchment, just slightly.

"What's that?" she asks.

"A letter to Lyna," he lies.

She turns her body, throwing an arm across his chest and nearly knocking over his ink well on the nightstand. Her grace on the battlefield does not extend to these early hours of the morning.

He leans in to kiss her forehead. "I'm sorry I woke you, my love."

She buries her nose further into his neck. Warmth slips into his heart, like he had been missing her there. She murmurs something.

"I'm telling Lyna your name day is coming up," he says in response.

She mumble-growls something else against his skin -- something akin to a rejection -- and then falls asleep in an instant. He smirks and moves his arm so he can lay a hand flat against her back, rubbing his thumb down the column of her spine. He presses his quill harder into the parchment to ensure it does not fall from his lap, other hand occupied so.

_Her freckles trouble_  
_the milk of her skin;_  
_Fearsome eyes, the sea within._  
_Not quiet, nor meek nor softly keeping,_  
_she makes men weep_  
_by sound of her sleeping._

He laughs softly. This is not good, even if the tone is getting there. But so is the way of creativity and shaking off years of disuse -- the garbage and ash must come off first. His hands move, enjoying the openness a new day promises and relishing the warmth of one he thought he'd never have beside him.

And then he stops suddenly.

His inspiration strikes hard and his heart pounds heavily, thrilling at the words, but he does not yet write them. He taps the paper with his quill. Too presumptuous? Too much? They'd spoke of marriage, confirmed they were both interested in the concept. He is a man of many failings; he will not be denied eternity with her because he forgot a step in some higher power's eyes, belief in said gods or no.

He decides to taste the words on his tongue. To press them to paper on the promise of a draft.

_Forgive my wife her foibles thus_  
_She is, alas, the best of us._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mom tiredness is getting to me. lmao


	15. argy-bargy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Oh shite," Ardbert mutters next to him. G'raha's grip tightens around his staff. Neither of them know what to do. They rather look like two gaping fish, open mouthed at the glass.
> 
> [FFXIV Write 2020, day 22: argy-bargy]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two WoL AU! Ardbert is alive and on the Source. Don't ask questions. Lmao.  
> (It may get explained in a longfic I am pondering :tm:).  
> Mihren is the creation of @masqvia.
> 
> No warnings. Just two mad ladies and two confounded lads.

One day, after a fierce battle against Imperial forces on the Estersands, Ardbert and G'raha learn the hard way to keep their heads down.  
  
"Mihren!"

The name is a shriek. A curse. G'raha has never heard Izzie say it like that, in any of the years he's known her. He instinctually lifts his staff, as if to prepare for another enemy onslaught, but quiet has settled across the Dalmascan sands, save Izzie storming toward their healer like a whorl of dust.

"What the hells!" she shouts. "You nearly lost your head, pulling that move!"

G'raha expects Mihren to pacify her, as is required more often than not. Instead, she steps right to Izzie. His stomach drops off a cliff.

"I wouldn't have had to if you hadn't keep getting in the way of their weapons," Mihren snaps. Her words crackle like lightning.

"Oh shite," Ardbert mutters next to him. G'raha's grip tightens around his staff. Neither of them know what to do. They rather look like two gaping fish, open mouthed at the glass.

Izzie does not let up. "You weren't paying attention, so--"

"Because I kept having to heal your imbecilic ass, _I'serivine_."

"Oh, don't you full name me, you--"

"I will, and I'll do it again, until you fucking listen to me--"

"I'm sorry, _m'lady_ , I forgot you never make any mistakes..."

It goes on like this for a full minute. Ardbert and G'raha look to each other in deep, nigh existential horror at the thought they may have to step in between two of the most powerful women on two worlds to stop them from killing one another.

The two old souls share a sense of the battlefield together, as they often do; they are the first and last shield against any threats to this world's Warriors of Light. Ardbert rolls his shoulders and stretches out his hands. G'raha weaves the cool energy of a barrier between his fingers, just in case. They take a few steps forward together.

This is a mistake.

Mihren's gaze is piercing and dark. Izzie glares with the intensity of an inferno.

" _Stay out of it!_ " they both shout at once.

The men take three very large steps back, feet slipping on the sand. They watch in fearful mystification as Izzie and Mihren continue to snap and snarl at each other, the air whipping about them dangerously. G'raha's entire body feels on edge.

And then, just as suddenly, it stops. Izzie rubs her forehead and stares over Mihren's head like she does when she's pondering something heavy. Mihren's small shoulders droop. They mutter something unintelligible from this distance, and walk off together toward the closest camp of wounded, arms near touching.

It dawns on Ardbert first. "Huh. It was an argy-bargy."

G'raha near recoils from the coarseness of the word. "I'm sorry, a what?"

"A fight."

"...my friend, if that was not obvious to you before--"

Ardbert waves him off. "No, like...they're letting off steam. They're not really _mad_ at each other, kind of thing."

"Ah." G'raha glances to retreating figures of the women, blurring under the sun. He feels combatting urges to follow and stay very far away. "Your Norvrandt slang never fails to take me back."

Ardbert snorts; they are among the only two people on either world that would remember such a thing. But as G'raha observes them, he realizes just how apt the term is. Their anger at each other is ocean spray or roiling fog after a storm -- the effluence of years together and the trust to work through deeper fears and furies without damaging the other. The understanding that no one else would ever _get_ it. The fractured stress lines of years and years of pressure from every direction can prickle and tear at a person's mind until they shatter. One either crumbles or finds a way to sort it out. This is, apparently, one of their ways to cope.

"Well," G'raha says. "I'm glad to see we won't have to stop the next calamity this day."

Ardbert smirks. "Not today, anyway. Let's not tempt fate, eh?"

The men stalk after the Warriors of Light, slow and steady. Some things they will never be able to fully understand. They weren't there. But they can, in this world and any, do their best not to court the fury of the godkillers they love very, very much.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'anyway you wanna get sodas.'  
> 'yeah.'
> 
> the deep izzie lore: her name originally was the birth name of my tiefling druid. Neither of them use that name anymore. Lol.


	16. shuffle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He watches the cards fly between her hands. He so badly wants to see the inside of her head that his whole vision shakes. He has to remember to breathe.
> 
> The Warrior of Light, he reminds himself, does not have time for someone like you. 
> 
> [FFXIV Write, day 23: shuffle]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CT Era. G'raha x WoL.
> 
> what even is a canon timeline for that raid series! i don't know her!

The firelight glints wickedly off the whites of her teeth. 

"You'd be stabbed in Ul'dah for that," she says. 

Izzie nods to his poor attempts at shuffling the deck. Her grin is maniacal; he must keep an eye on it, lest she do something untoward. So he keeps saying to himself.

"It's just cards," he sniffs. 

"Life or death for some, you know."

He can't tell if she's serious. Not for the first time, the world tunnels in close and dark as his eyes catch on the shadow of a scar on her cheek. He is glad the fire hides his flushing skin.

She leans in just slightly. "You've really never played this?"

"Really," he says. 

She reaches for the deck. He gathers up the mess of cards -- he kept dropping them in an attempt to cut them coolly as she had done -- and hands them over. Their fingers touch; his awareness of his hands sharpens near painfully.

She doesn't look at him as she fixes his mess.

"What do you scholars do all day then?" she asks.

He smiles. "We study, of course."

"No you don't. Well, _you_ don't.” She looks right up at him and he feels his heart flip. “You shoot at least.” Her mouth softens just ever so slightly. “You must get bored easily."

He watches the cards fly between her hands. He so badly wants to see the inside of her head that his whole vision shakes. He has to remember to breathe.

 _The Warrior of Light_ , he reminds himself, _does not have time for someone like you._

"Sometimes," he agrees softly.

"Right, then." She stacks the deck, finishing her work with a pleasant, slick snap. "I'll teach you. And you'll have something to hold over the others when you go back."

She opens herself up for a tease. _Because card games would impress the Scholars of Baldesion._ And she would say _Well, it impressed you, so that makes you a lump, doesn’t it?_ And he would have to prove her wrong, smiling into her open-rose face like he could do it forever.

He can't bring himself to. Something, a wrongness, holds him back. Pain and a memory that isn't his own. The blasted eye. A cursed place. But when he’s honest with himself, it is only half that anymore. Her grin may be the art of a demoness, but something in her tone is an arrow to the heart, and he near kneels from the pain of it -- the ugly kind of ache that he recognizes like one bird’s song to another. 

She too feels lonely. Even in a crowded room.

“I haven't decided what I'm doing next, after this,” he says suddenly, and he realizes at once that it is true.

“Oh?” Those sea-bright eyes glance up at him. “Will you be staying in Eorzea?” A beat passes and she immediately tacks on: “So you can be a massive pain in my ass?” 

But he holds onto the pure elation he heard there like it is a careful treasure. His ribs squeeze the air out of him.

“I may be. The mystery of the eye yet remains.”

“I bet we could figure it out.” She shyly returns her gaze to dealing cards. Or perhaps he is projecting. It’s impossible to tell in the magic of firelight. “We're not so bad at puzzles.”

“Of course!” he says, droll. “They only take us a few hours each time.”

She grins so brightly, a full moon to the flame. She laughs. His world spins. Gods above.

He’s such a _fool_...

“The tower will take months to catalog once we reach it's heights, I’m sure.” He picks up his cards when she gestures toward them, and he’s thankful for somewhere to train his eyes. “I may linger in Mor Dhona for some time yet.”

He's always felt this way. From the first moment, he’d sought excuses simply to look at her. As soon as he pulled his first prank and saw her in Urth’s Font, he was but a stranger in her shadow, seeking the turn of her eye. She is the Warrior of Light. Such desires are natural, to be noticed by someone like that.

But the truth of it is that he no longer cares so much if the Warrior notices him. He wants this girl to -- Izzie, terror of Revenant’s Toll.

“I dunno where I’ll be going.” Her voice, as ever, reminds him of the chirping of a songbird. “Wherever the Scions seek to go, I guess. Our base is here now. So maybe we’ll run into each other a lot, when this is done.”

She’s never smiled so softly at him before. His mouth goes dry.

“I’d like that,” he says, sincere.

She stares at him openly, boldly. He does not know for how long. The door to the tower proper is close to discovery. He can feel it, an old song thrumming right in his blood. But it’s nothing compared to the heady feeling of her gaze, sweeping up and down his face, searching.

_Whatever it is you want to find...let me give it to you._

She turns away.

“Rammbroes!” she calls. “Come play with us.”

The man booms out a questioning laugh before approaching. G’raha is fine with this. He is. It’s the perfect excuse to simply look at her in the firelight just a little bit longer. Just in case.


	17. beam

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He pulls a soft tunic overhead and steps out of his private quarter’s washroom...  
> ...to be confronted with Izzie spooling herself up in the robes of the Crystal Exarch.
> 
> [FFXIV Write, day 24: beam]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 5.x, likely in the 5.2 era...it's all mushy.  
> An idea I stole blatantly from the fanfic discord, which is linked below haha.
> 
> Minor implication of sexual intimacy, but no real warnings, unless you are allergic to sugary fluff....  
> crystal exarch x wol

Even old men have their vanities, it would seem.

G’raha stares at his body in the mirror with new eyes, pondering the markings on his skin -- those borne to him by crystal and teeth. He pokes a mark, purpling against his pale neck, and flushes bloody and hot when he considers who claimed him thus. How else can he think of it? He’s known since the beginning who he belongs to.

Anyway, it’s not as if he’s ever in the mindset to  _ stop  _ her while it’s happening...

He finds comfort in the old rhythms of preparing for sleep. He splashes his face with cool water from the metal sink and lets his hair down from the braid, brushing it through with his fingers. His body does not need rest in the traditional way, but the entire world would have to shatter again for him to reject Izzie’s quiet request to join her in bed.

He pulls a soft tunic overhead and steps out of his private quarters' washroom...

...to be confronted with Izzie spooling herself up in the robes of the Crystal Exarch.

They drape heavily on her thin body. Her shoulders are strong, but his are far more broad; the sleeves swallow up her arms. She clearly struggled with the way each piece of fabric was meant to tie together and where the golden fitments were to lay; she is, more than anything, the Crystal Laundry Pile.

A laugh comes barreling out of him.

She spins around, with a horrified squeak. As if to save face, she thrusts a finger out at him, accusing.

“Y-you were taking a long time!” she stammers. “I...got curious!”

His heart bleeds light. When he regains his ability to think, he dramatically bows, arms flung out in a flourish. "My Lady Exarch."

Her expression flickers from small horror to brilliant grin as she catches onto the game. Her hands fumble to pull the hood over her eyes, the gold charms tinkling dully, and she clears her throat, putting on her  _ Baldesion scholar _ voice. "Ah yes. Fetch me my tea and slippers. I won't tell you what for. That is my business."

He can’t stop beaming at her, even if the joke is entirely at his expense. "A cruel lady, you are."

"To the Labyrinth with you!"

He steps closer, drawn like a moth. "My Lady, I regret to inform you that it did not make it off the Source..."

She snort-laughs, blurring her severe affect. "Fie, why did we pay our mages so much if they missed an entire floor! I have the boundless wisdom of Allag!"

His hands catch in the smooth linen, beaten and soft from time. He seeks the shape of her waist through the fabric and pulls her closer. "With all due respect, it is quite your bedtime, your radiance."

"Hrm." She stills under his touch, seeking it. "I shall make mysterious proclamations another day."

He helps her unpin the fabric. "We wait with bated breath." 

Her shoulders slide free first. He places a single kiss on the curve of her neck, relishing the way she shudders under his mouth even still. He gently turns her about so that he can better figure exactly how she’d tangled herself up in the raiments of the Exarch, but then she stiffens. He looks up, over her shoulder.

Their reflections stare back at them in the long mirror on his wall. 

He hears her breath catch in her throat. Her hands bunch in the fabric against her chest. "How in seven hells did you wear this all the time.”

He settles his chin on her shoulder, unable to tear his gaze away from the mirror. "In fairness, you  _ are _ wearing it wrong."

They watch each other in silence; it is rediscovery, echoing and heavy. His shadows are darker; her scars, deeper. Flashes of white shimmer in her hair, like his, but from the ferocity of light rather than time. Her fluttering hands reveal delicate lines of chalk and gold where veins should be. Crystal near mars his eye. 

“Look at us,” Izzie breathes. 

“Time has left its mark,” he murmurs.

Something in his tone, perhaps, prompts her to turn around. She sets her palms on his cheeks, the heat of her skin like fire against his crystal scars. His fists ball in the fabric at her waist, seeing the deep welling in her eyes. Her smile wobbles, fragile as glass.

“I like it.” Her hands slink to his neck, her eyes slipping to his collarbones. “It’s proof of...everything we did to get here.”

What would the two of them from years ago -- a few, a century -- think, seeing this?

Perhaps:  _ finally. _

He places his Spoken hand over one of hers on his face and closes his eyes, tilting until their foreheads touch.

"Fear not, my dear lady exarch," he says, words brushing her cheekbones. "I am no longer the foolish boy who will run out on you."

Her voice remains downcast. "You didn't  _ run out _ on me..."

"But it was a foolish thing to do, I know."

She lays her head on his shoulder. "...it’s worked out so far."

He adjusts his arms to wrap them more fully around her. "Mmm."

"Just don't test me,” she mutters into his shirt.

"I care too much about the future to try," he says. "I've had ideas. I...beg you to trust me on this, one more time."

She leans back at his seriousness. 

"I mean it," he says. "Everything I said. I will be with you, come all seven hells."

Her eyes scan his face, over and over, as if he might be hiding another secret pain from her. He will never stop making amends for that, he knows, but every day of atonement by her side will be worth 100 years without her. He will see it done.

"Good," she says. "It's rather hard to be the Lady Exarch without the Lord running about making trouble, you know."

She reaches round and flicks the base of his tail, grinning impishly. His arms tighten around her. Love swells, sweet and warm, in his chest.

"Making trouble you say?"

He sweeps her up, bridal style, fabric swallowing her like water. She giggles like they're children again.

"He does do that,” he says, “and a few things besides."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i just.......have a lot of feelings....


	18. wish

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Ma," he asks. The boy did not know how to linger in silence for longer than a few moments. "Are wishes real?"
> 
> Her heart does difficult things when he turns his gaze toward her. His seagreen eye glows like crystal. He no longer has the patience for the magical thinking of youth, but it is something his poor Ma clings to even in adulthood. She sticks, then, to her truth.
> 
> "I think so."
> 
> [FFXIV Write, Day 25: wish]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cutting it close today so this might be sloppy as hell. I spent way too much time thinking about their son's eyes for something I'm just supposed to yeet out (and also for a headcanon I already established in another fic!!!).
> 
> wol x g'raha. Vague future -- married, with a kid.

For once, her son is standing still.

His face is turned upward, tracking the sky from one of the higher walkways in Revenant's Toll. Izzie stops on the road below to watch him.

He's sprouting like a bean, arms and legs losing their baby softness by the day. His tail is getting longer, in the color of his mother's hair, a deep orange like the sunset. He rolls on the balls of his feet even when standing still; he must always be moving. He got that from her, unfortunately. But he looks so much like his father, especially in these moments of calm, that sometimes Izzie must do a double take to ensure it isn't the Echo playing tricks.

" _Ma!_ " Yana shouts suddenly, springing toward the wall closer to town and to her. She instinctively jolts toward him, though he is no longer a toddler at risk with every move he takes. He hasn't been for years. "Ma, it's starting!"

She eyes the sky. A star streaks across it.

"Well come on back down, then! I set us up a spot!"

She hears him scrambling down the steps of the tower, the kind of chaotic cacophony only a young boy can pull off without having to break any bones, before he rockets toward her. He is still young enough to throw his arms like magnets around her waist in his thrill.

He grins up at her. "Come on, come on!"

She plants a messy kiss between his ears. "Lead the way."

Permission granted, he springs ahead, down into the valley toward where the Scions had prepared blankets and quilts for stargazing. The starlight was bright enough, reflected by the crystal-marred landscape, that she didn't fear losing him in the night.

Even in his youthful impatience, he waits for her at their chosen spot. Once she begins to sit, however, he throws himself to the ground in a dramatic flop.

"Ow."

She laughs. He sits up immediately and beams with pure delight. It is evenings like this where she understands why her own Ma put up with her for so long.

His heterochromic eyes dart back toward town. "They're gonna miss it..."

"They'll be out soon, darlin'."

"Da! Hurry up!" Yana shouts into the air. Izzie places a hand on his head.

"If you keep being so loud you will scare all the stars away."

"Not-uh."

"How do you know?"

"...cuz. Stars don't scare."

And sometimes he is painfully like his father. His red eye glitters at her in the dark.

She smirks and lays down. He follows not long after, and for a few moments they lay in peace, her arm laid around the top of his head. Stars streak across the sky like charms jingling on a bracelet.

"Ma," he asks. The boy did not know how to linger in silence for longer than a few moments. "Are wishes real?"

Her heart does difficult things when he turns his gaze toward her. His seagreen eye glows like crystal. He no longer has the patience for the magical thinking of youth, but it is something his poor Ma clings to even in adulthood. She sticks, then, to her truth.

"I think so."

He squints in thought. She's seen that expression on her own face before; it's strange to see it reflected back. "How do you know?"

She ruffles his hair. He doesn't flinch away yet, not like she used to at his age, and she prays it means something worthy. "You were born."

He giggles. Maybe he thinks it's a joke. He has the confidence of a child who knows he is loved, and she'll always be relieved for that.

"Really?" he asks. "Did you wish for me on a star?"

"I did," she says, and it isn't a lie. She wished for proof she could be more than a soldier. She shepherded a soul into the world; he, Yana, fills in the wobbly shadows of her hopes with vivacious life. He is the context of her every dream, discovered down the path years later.

"Huh," he says, as if considering it. "What if I wish for--"

"Shh!" she says. "You can't tell me or it won't come true."

"What about your other--" He jolts up. "Da! You were gonna miss it!"

Raha arrives in her field of view as he lays on the blanket on the other side of their son. He smiles, warm and patient, even as Yana accosts him with a body slam, his mop of hair smothering his father's face.

"I wasn't!" Raha insists, breath knocked out of him. "I would never."

"We're talking about wishes," Yana says as Raha reaches a hand to Izzie. She clasps it tightly.

"Were you now. You mustn't tell anyone yours if you would like it to come true, you know."

"Ma said that," Yana says impatiently. "I'm trying to decide if they're real. Ma had one come true, though."

Raha lays a hand on their son's head. And then he says: "I think they're real."

Even Izzie perks her ears slightly at this. "See?" she says. "Ma knows what she's talking about, sometimes."

Yana rolls off Raha so he is between them on his back, watching the sky. He turns his head slightly to Raha. "So you had a wish come true?"

"Many times over, in fact."

Yana stiffens in attention at this revelation. "What ones?"

"Well, you were--"

"No! Ma already said that."

Raha flickers a smile at his wife. "Hmm. It's a very good one." But his attention shifts as he pushes himself up on one arm, gazing toward the horizon. Izzie doesn't need to track his stare to know to what he looks upon. "I wished for your Ma. A thousand times."

Izzie's heart still hurts to hear it, even now.

"...you wished for Ma to be born?"

Izzie and Raha both laugh at that. "No," Raha says. "I wished for her safety. For her to find me. For her love."

"Oh!" Yana says. "When you were in the tower you mean."

He knew the story, so far as it fit into bedtime tales. Izzie and Raha knew themselves well enough to know their son surely would see through obfuscation quicker than the light of day itself. And Raha knew firsthand the pain unleashed by secrets dogging you until you are forced into a decision that defines the path of two worlds.

 _He'll have a choice_ , Raha had said in relief when they realized their son would have only one red eye. _Perhaps some things should be lost to time, now._

"And he did a good job," Izzie says softly. Her hand squeezes Raha's.

"I guess," Yana says doubtfully.

"You guess?" Izzie says, playfully offended.

"If it was a wish, then the stars helped you, Da. Obviously."

Yana's parents laugh. How strange it was, to hear them both in the voice of their son, demolishing them both. How beautiful and unexpected.

"Well then, my young professor," Raha says. "You best get on wishing should you like to channel the power of the stars."

And so he does. He lies in rare quietude below the linked hands of his mother and father as stars fall in lovely silence all around them.


	19. when pigs fly

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Have you considered the possibility that our resident scholar of Allag has a particular fondness for you?"
> 
> If she had been waiting for this hammer to drop, she spins so quickly in his direction that she would have fooled him. Her ears are flat against her head. Her tail prickles, as if threatened. " _What?_ "
> 
> [FFXIV Write, day 26: when pigs fly]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> g'raha/wol, CT era.

Rammbroes has had enough.

He sets down the ledger he's working on and raises his voice so he can be heard over the boisterous semi-arguing happening a few steps away. "Miss Izzie, do you have a moment?"

For being a preternaturally powerful fighter, she is also the easier of his Problem Duo to talk down. Her ears flatten and she spins dramatically away from G'raha. Rammbroes opens an arm, gesturing to the other side of camp, and Izzie silently stalks away. G'raha watches after them, tail thrashing, gaze darting between Rammbroes and the young woman.

"We'll finish this later, then!" G'raha calls out.

"Go to _bed_!" Izzie snaps at him.

G'raha opens his mouth, but Rammbroes stares at him until he shuts it again.

When he catches up with her, the roegadyn places a hand on Izzie's shoulder, large enough to envelop it, and guides her to the far ledge overlooking one of Mor Dhona's many scraped out valleys. She fidgets in place. He lets her feel out the silence.

"I'm very sorry, Rammbroes," she says, eventually. It's rote, as if she was trained to say it, but it isn't insincere. "I shouldn't let small things like this get in the way of our goals."

"My dear...I was 19 once."

Her arms cross around her middle and she looks deeply into the starlit quarries of crystal. Her jaw tightens. He feels a familiar pang -- one he gets when watching a student work through a problem he himself once felt he would never solve.

"I won't bring this up again. I promise you that," he says. "But for your sake, I feel someone must."

Her eyes shift to him, though her face is still turned outward. He realizes she expects to be scolded for something. He lays his hand out flat, a gesture encouraging calm, and her shoulders slacken slightly.

"I have known many a scholar in my life," he says. "Many a young male scholar, at that." He crosses his hands behind his back and peers out over the wildscape. The tower shimmers fiercely under the moonlight. "They are a wickedly sharp bunch and are very aware of that fact. It's worse when they're good-looking."

Izzie pointedly looks away from him.

"They're also horrible about dropping this persona when it matters," he continues. "So. The point of it. Have you considered the possibility that our resident scholar of Allag has a particular fondness for you?"

If she had been waiting for this hammer to drop, she spins so quickly in his direction that she would have fooled him. Her ears are flat against her head. Her tail prickles, as if threatened. " _What?_ "

Rammbroes raises his eyebrows.

"No!" she near shouts. "Absolutely...absolutely fu--freaking not!" Rammbroes hides a smile at that. Evidently, the girl did not like to cuss in front of anyone she saw as an elder figure, and it makes his heart twist a strange way to think they rely on her as their van against monsters bred by a centuries old empire. "No way. _Rammbroes._ Are you serious?"

 _Someone doth protest too much_ , he thinks to say, but he does not. For the sake of everyone in camp, she needs to work this out here. "It's simply a suggestion from years of observation."

"He's insufferable! The most pompous idiot I've ever met! I would...I would be interested in him only when pigs fly!"

She kicks a rock so hard it smacks into the craggy rocks below with a sharp crack. Her tail lashes, back and forth, and her hands ball into fists.

He decides not to press it. Though he notes to great amusement that he never asked about _her_ feelings on the matter.

* * *

When she blinks away the pixie fog smothering her eyes, Izzie laughs -- a pointy, bitter thing. She crosses her arms around her middle, just like she did all those years ago.

Thancred sidles up to her peripheral. Ever the watchman. "Something up?"

Her eyes track the flittering, tiny pig ... floating on the air.

As ever, G'raha Tia would have the last laugh.

"No," she says. "Just remembering an old joke."  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> its NOT angst because they had a kid last chapter okay, its fine, they're gonna be okay


	20. irenic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If she is a religion, he is its last living apostle. 
> 
> [FFXIV Write, day 28: irenic]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **5.0 SPOILERS**
> 
> Eighth Umbral Era. This is a painful one folks, pretty much pure angst considering its time period, so please keep that in mind.

irenic

**noun**

A part of Christian theology concerned with reconciling different denominations and sects.

* * *

The Warrior of Light is a religion. A goddess. No churches dare exist now save congregations around campfires, but her Word spreads nonetheless -- a single, blinking light in endless ash and dust. G’raha sits at the edge of one such campfire now, boots dug into the rocky sands of Thanalan, and he presses his eyes into his palms to smother his endless headache.

He was right. Is right. Her star is the point by which he would chart his own path. When he thinks of those old days now, he thinks of the stories of hubris he read in his youth -- young men whose bodies broke against the waves whilst they shouted at the Gods, young women who burned when they toed too close to heaven. He’d cursed her in their eyes when he shut the gates to old Allag, claiming righteously how good the world would become. The gods must have thought that funny.

He tries to remember the rollicking pitch of her laugh -- how it would explode out of her like a shot, sudden and bright as a sun flare. He discovers even memories wear like a worry cloth under one’s thumb. He wonders, on days where he dodges bombs and slips in pools of blood and chokes on smoke, if he’d only heard it in a dream.

Did she exist as he saw her? Or were they memories implanted by the scion of some goddess?

 _This world doesn’t have time for your philosophizing, I’m afraid_ , Biggs says to him one evening. _She is what she is. She died. She lives on. That’s all we know._

It is easier to ask impossible questions. Why did he lock himself away? Why did she, if she was so powerful, let him do it? They are impossible because he knows the answers and no longer likes them.

He did it because he thought it was right. And she believed him.

No goddess would make that mistake.

* * *

If she is a religion, he is its last living apostle. 

_You knew her?_ They always ask, everyone, because his tale has spread through the spluttering oral tradition that connects the survivors of the Eighth Umbral Era like a spider down its silk. _What was she like_ , they ask, and gods he has come to dread the question.

 _You’ve had more time with her_ , he thinks, bitter.

He manages their curiosity because that is now his job, for the last living apostle has a mission to fulfill. He asks them what they have heard, first. He sorts through their truths to figure out the shape of her in their hearts. Only then will he stammer out his tales -- usually the images of her striding into the Crystal Tower, some few adventurers at her back, shoulders squared against fear.

Through this exchange, he gathers the information he needs. He cross-checks against other tales to find which ones are most likely. He is a scholar again, this time of _her_ , and he thinks she might have laughed at that.

He has bits of evidence of her person that no one wants. The way she threw pebbles at his head when he would think for too long. The way he could read the placement of her hands on her hips, her peculiar bend at the waist, and discern her mood. The way she would pretend she wasn’t drunk on two glasses of wine. The way she would sing. By the Twelve, her voice.

And the one evening he found her crying over a letter from her mother. _I think I’ve just tricked everybody,_ she said.

He tells the story of her killing the Cloud of Darkness to raucous applause.

My gods, he thinks, my gods, she would have hated this.

* * *

They hit a breakthrough when they find a complete copy of _Heavensward_. They hit another when they find a hardened group of Doman warriors with artfully tended scrolls; one portrays a golden-orange woman against the green fire of a dragon. 

She was a girl. A woman. Nineteen. Twenty. Upward to twenty-two, barely two decades of life, snuffed out in an instant. Her name changes in the record at one point from I’serivine Idel to Izzie Nenelori, and he realizes that she took on the name of her father. G’raha wishes he knew why. His fingers curl against the parchment, some old ledger that somehow had recorded her name, and he has to breathe deeply not to tear it with his sudden fury that he hadn’t _been there._

No one cared to record that story, it would seem. 

No one has it straight where she died, exactly; all the versions are suitably bombastic for such a figure. They all end with Black Rose choking the life from her.

The only one that rings true is the least favorite among Her congregation: the one where She is found not at the van of a great army or holding out in a final siege by the Empire, but one where she is found already dead, thrown over the small bodies of two young elezen at the edge of the Steps of Faith.

Twenty-one.

Althyk be damned.

* * *

The Ironworks does the impossible. He readies himself for his final mission as her apostle. He will go back in time and he will fish her out of the grasp of death.

He decides to take one last pilgrimage.

Her body was lost. Stories linger about that, too; one tells of a hulking giant of a man, hair ashen pale, taking her into shadow, never to be seen again. But she has a gravesite nonetheless, marked by one of the original founders of the Ironworks.

It is a quiet spot next to a pond in Thanalan, adorned only by the flowers and daggers and notes left by fellow pilgrims. Current conjecture is that her mother and father had been buried here. When he finds it, it is the first time he feels that his memories of her aren’t entirely made up.

She could be quiet, sometimes. It was the kind of quiet that would gut you. She would twist her head just so, pondering a dandelion’s fleece, and he would think of bone structure for many days. Her eyes before he turned his back on her were welling and deep. She had so much to say. She would never shut up. And she would never speak her truest thoughts aloud except quietly to you under the moonlight, when she didn’t think you were awake.

"It shouldn't have been like this," he whispers, like a prayer of his own. "You are more than this."

Her name will not be the last and only light. She will not become a scalding brightness that blurs her edges into nothing. He will join the annals of her story and right her path.

He will build the warm hearths of her future with his death. Someone, sometime, will learn to know her heart. They must. He will give her that chance with everything he has.

He will know if he remembered her laugh true, and it will be enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> anyway I hurt myself in my confusion
> 
> the cameo by our good ol' prince buddy was inspired by [this prompt fill](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26239480/chapters/64715545#workskin) by frostmantle, I haven't stopped thinking about it.


	21. paternal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Of course I was furious with him," she says. "But you heard his story. Their story." Her eyes sharpen upon him. "He might be it, Edmont."
> 
> He sucks in his lip. "I suppose."
> 
> [FFXIV Write, day 29: paternal]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> edmont & wol (and wol's Ma, ha.)
> 
> Reminder for newcomers: Sheshena is Izzie's adoptive mother. Izzie is a Seeker of the Sun.

Edmont de Fortemps watches his young ward as she fusses with her chocobo, the venerable Bonbon. His hand tightens around the head of his cane as she smiles, mouth jabbering, eyes bright -- life he has not seen within her since the day they lost Haurchefaunt.  
  
He feels a deep warmth. A strange, twisting loss. She is more than his ward to the world, anymore. But then that is why he cannot stop thinking of the day he met her -- near frozen, eyes wide and stricken, the kind of taut attentiveness only a survivor bears.

And so he is watchful.  
  
The red-haired boy is...curious. _This is G'raha Tia_ , Izzie had said, and he had been rankled hearing that name again. Not so long ago, his was a name tied only to her sadness. Alas, he must admit: the boy's manners were impressive; his speech, well-educated. _You were the writer of Heavensward!_ he said with an excitement usually reserved for someone like Lord de Borel, which Edmont finds...charming, if odd. And, on top of it all, he looks upon Izzie like she is Halone herself.

Points in his favor, he'll grant.

G'raha reaches for the 'bo -- and jolts back when Bonbon snaps his beak at his hand, dark eyes looming imperiously. Izzie booms in laughter so loud he hears it through the window.

Edmont chuckles under his breath. It seems Bonbon may remember the sadder days, too.

"Quite a pair," he says.

"Forming an opinion then, are you?" Sheshena asks. He hears her set her tea cup down with a porcelain clink before he turns to regard her.

His mouth quirks. His chair creaks as he resettles at their velvet tea spread. "Have _you_ , my lady?"

The lalafell shadows her gaze, squinting into the middle distance. "Who would I be if I didn't?" A silence lingers after they hear another of Izzie's laughs. An understanding; she is happy. That is their goal. She brings the cup back to her lips. "He's got old eyes."

"So he does," Edmont agrees. Haunting, blood red, the color of history and kings. A heaviness he did not expect. An agedness he sees only in the mirror. "Will he weigh her down?"

Sheshena tilts her head. "Only in the way she needs."

"Now, _that's_ an assessment."

" _Of course_ I was furious with him," she says. "But you heard his story. _Their_ story." Her eyes sharpen upon him. "He might be it, Edmont."

He sucks in his lip. "I suppose."

Sheshena smiles, gracious. So many things could have been different. They both know it. But events transpired as they did. Here they sit. There _she_ lives. He thinks of the empty stare in Izzie's eyes the night she was brought from Ghimlyt and how he wished to shake her like a glowstone until the light returned to her eyes. She was so close to slipping away. Had no one else seen it?

"What is his lineage?" he decides to ask.

Sheshena scoffs, amused. "That line of questioning doesn't hold much water outside these halls, you know..."

He taps the table with his finger. His eyes slip shut. "So long as she's provided for..."

Sheshena laughs, then, a tinkling sound. He opens his eyes. His shoulders relax. He is being ridiculous, he knows.

"She won't forget you, my dear Lord Edmont," Sheshena says, eyes sparkling. "Her mother rather likes to take her tea here, besides."

He smiles, despite himself. "It isn't _just_ about me, my lady..."

"You needn't worry, then," she says. "To hear Izzie explain it, he's an Allagan princeling. By a technicality."

Edmont smirks. So he had gathered. "No money in a dead empire, I'm afraid."

"Then I guess your position is secure!"

He chuckles, deep and rumbling. "You wound me, my lady..."

They fall into companionable silence until the red-headed young woman who veritably runs their lives comes barreling back into the room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i wrote this during a zoom meeting and i feel like you can tell.  
> one more prompt!


	22. splinter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Can you imagine it?" Mihren whispers, horrified.
> 
> "I don't understand." Izzie lays back down to hide from the night air. "Like I didn't exist?"
> 
> Mihr sniffs, which is answer enough.
> 
> [FFXIV Write, Day 30: splinter]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the end, I'm feeling more and more  
> There won't be any end  
> No ice walls, no frozen firmament to clearly define  
> The corners and lines of our divine invention  
> So paper-thin you see right through it   
> \--  
> The Oh Hellos, Glowing
> 
> (Two WoL AU to finish this out!)

Sometimes it hits her hard, like a boulder to the chest; Izzie does not understand the purpose of her gangly body, lying there limp under the moon. She wonders about settling -- about whether she is river silt or ash on the wind. One finds foundation. The other scatters forever.

Then Mihren wakes up sobbing.

Mihren doesn't cry loudly. Very little she does, in the privacy of camping beneath the stars, is loud. In the day, Izzie fills in the gaps with her voice until they form a full tapestry together. But Izzie hears her in the night, and she tangles her limbs in her sleeping roll in her haste to see if all is well.

(Of course it isn't. Who cries when things are well?)

"Mihr?"

"I was alone," Mihren says, choked and small. "I saw worlds where I was alone."

The Dravanian Forelands are cold and golden and biting. Izzie shivers when the air hits her body. How hopeless it all can seem.

"Well, you're not," Izzie says, intent. "I don't think that was your Echo."

"Can you imagine it?" Mihren whispers, horrified.

"I don't understand." Izzie lays back down to hide from the night air. "Like I didn't exist?"

Mihr sniffs, which is answer enough.

Izzie doesn't want to imagine it. When she tries, all she sees are splinters in the dark -- the depth of their losses without a rope to scramble to. It feels worse than death. It's just...nothing. With no way out.

* * *

Izzie peers into the stony valleys of Coerthas from her Ishgardian balcony. "Do you ever think about how...we're going to be doing this forever?"

Mihren adjusts her wool mittens. "Freezing our arses off?"

"Adventuring. Fighting the whole world."

Mihren falls quiet at that. The world is muffled by new snow. "Sometimes."

Is there a future in that? Do they ever get to rest on their laurels? There may not be an end to any of this, Izzie thinks darkly, and her heart churns and churns and churns.

* * *

There are five Warriors of Darkness.

"Five!" Izzie throws her hands up, near knocking over her ale at the Forgotten Knight. "How is that fair!"

The tavern is quiet, as it always is, but Mihren still darts her eyes about, as if someone will hear their weakness. Still. "We've dealt with worse."

"I don't think Hydaelyn could grapple with having five of you two," Thancred says into his tankard.

Years later, and Ardbert is absorbed into _their_ wandering band, instead. A piece with no puzzle left. He fits in well; the earth to their fire and air.

"We always thought it was unfair that you had four other Warriors of Light," Izzie comments to him as they patrol Mor Dhona. "More people to shoulder the shite, and all that."

Ardbert watches her closely, as he tends to do. He's a brash man; unlike Izzie, he's more intentional about it. "It's more to lose."

"So?" Izzie says. "There's probably a version of me, in some world, without either you or Mihren or...G'raha." She kicks a rock and watches it fly into a nearby column of crystal. Bits fleck off and sparkle in the sun. "I don't think any of us would be better off."

* * *

Even G'raha returns to them. When his hood flies off on Mt. Gulg, Mihren thinks even while the Light is drowning her about how G'raha nearly killed Izzie when he left the first time -- and so it is again like that. Her bitterness tastes like paint.

But even as things shatter, so are the cracks gilded with gold. Mihren leans upon the doorway to the Umbilicus and stares until G'raha, weeks later, looks her way. Crystal crawls up to his eye. It bothers her strangely, like it is a revelation of what he looks like on the inside.

"I see things, you know," she says, and she cares not if he will turn to acknowledge her. He does. His sanguine eyes still, by instinct, make her plant her feet to the floor as if to ready a barrier.

He doesn't say anything. She almost wishes he would.

"There are worlds where she doesn't have any of us." For Izzie's sake, she keeps her voice even. "I want you to think about that next time you propose killing yourself."

She knows not the effect her words have. She doesn't stay to find out. But when he awakens on the Source, he does nod to her like he remembers.

* * *

Four corners. Four winds. Four is unlucky in Hingashi, but Izzie thinks that fits, too. When something breaks, they are called -- and no other adventurers in the world would like to be saddled with that burden.

A pebble hits her ear. It flicks. She turns to see Raha grinning at her. "Payback is sweet," he says. Ardbert and Mihren smile knowingly behind him. They know what is about to happen.

"Oh good," she says. "It's on."

She runs toward him. What she'll do when she gets there, not even she knows. But she relishes the calculation in his eyes. The mystery of it. A splinter of creation magic in the act of springing forward -- of seizing the hope that this is the best of all the worlds she could ever know.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i really yeeted it this time folks
> 
> thank you to everyone who has stuck around and read these!! It's been a really fun way to let off some steam during a strange month which included me returning to work full-time with my new baby daughter. Proof I can still find time to write. That's nice!

**Author's Note:**

> big thanks to the friends at Emet Selch's Wholesomely Debauched Bookclub for encouraging me to actually do these prompts! Join us here: https://discord.gg/WRuamm6


End file.
